Question

I am trying to do exercise 2.78 in SICP, but the functions put and get are unknown. I have tried multiple languages, like pretty big, racket, r5rs, mit-scheme, mzscheme, etc. I even downloaded the SICP support (http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-plt/), to no avail. How can I get these functions to work?

Answer 1

Yes, I found SICP a little annoying sometimes because of stuff like this. Functions that are assumed to exist but don’t actually exist make it harder to try to the examples. I wrote my own (get) and (put) like so (this was in GNU guile):

(define global-array '())

(define (make-entry k v) (list k v))
(define (key entry) (car entry))
(define (value entry) (cadr entry))

(define (put op type item)
  (define (put-helper k array)
    (cond ((null? array) (list(make-entry k item)))
          ((equal? (key (car array)) k) array)
          (else (cons (car array) (put-helper k (cdr array))))))
  (set! global-array (put-helper (list op type) global-array)))

(define (get op type)
  (define (get-helper k array)
    (cond ((null? array) #f)
          ((equal? (key (car array)) k) (value (car array)))
          (else (get-helper k (cdr array)))))
  (get-helper (list op type) global-array))

Probably a naive implementation from the perspective of later in the book, but fairly simple and worked fine.