Programming Praxis

[ I continue working at home. It’s no fun, and less productive than working in my office, but I’m coping. There remains much emergency work to be done related to moving all of our students online. I hope everyone is doing well during this time. ]

A student recently asked for help on a beginning-programmer forum to write a Scheme program that finds the nth item in a linked list, mimicking the list-ref built-in function. He posted his code, which was awful; I won’t repost it here. Instead of engaging him, I sent a private email suggesting that he consult either his professor or his teaching assistant, as his posted code showed several misconceptions about Scheme. He wrote back, saying he was sure there was only one thing wrong with his code and I could easily point it out. I didn’t respond, as there was far more than one thing wrong with his code.

Your task is to write a program to find the nth item in a linked list; your program must be recursive, as was required by the original assignment. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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[ I continue working from home. It is interesting that my commute has gone from a daily 75-minute round-trip by car to a 75-foot round-trip by foot, so I think I should have more energy in the evening, but the opposite is true; I am exhausted by the end of the day, just from sitting in front of my laptop. ]

Today’s exercise is somebody’s homework:

Given positive integers C and N, find N numbers that sum up to C and the difference between the highest and the lowest of these number should not be more than one. For example: with C = 26 and N = 7, the desired output is [4 4 4 4 4 3 3].

Your task is to write a program to solve the student’s homework. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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