ADT: Lisp/CarCdr

When storing real-world data, lists containing other lists are ubiquitous e.g. : (0 (1 2) 3 4 5). In fact many functional (or at least partly functional) languages are based around the idea that all data are, conceptually, nested lists. Examples of such languages include Haskell and, of interest here, Lisp

One of the main operations of these languages is the ability to extract the front (head) or remainder (tail) of the list very efficiently. A traditional linked list is not good for this, since it would require work to untangle the head (it has a pointer to the rest of the list) and it’s unclear how a list-within-a-list would be stored. For Lisp, a better structure was developed, which is slightly more complex than a traditional linked list, but which makes the extraction of the head (and remainder) simple and fast.

The atomic elements (the integers) are stored as ‘leaf’ nodes with both car and cdr pointers set to NULL. The data structure used to store the atom and also car and cdr pointers is known as a cons (short for constructor), due the to process by which we build lists. So, here, we’re interested in recreating this data structure, allowing the user to build lists (the cons operation), extract the head and remainder of lists (the car and cdr operations) and other associated functions such as copying a list or counting the number of elements in it.

Used By

This project is used by the following projects:

NUCLEI

Installation

The following instructions will get you a copy of the project and all the setting needed to test and compile on your local machine.

Prerequisites

make (Windows)
Valgrind (Not Supported on certain operatiing systems or versions)
GCC / Clang (Linux and Windows)

Compile & Test

Clone and navigate to the project

  git clone https://github.com/smallpaes/CarCdr.git
  cd CarCdr

Build and test

In this C project, we are using make to compile from several sources files into one executable. Please refer to Makefile for all the predefined rules and configuration.

Compile with essestial flags and sanitizers.

  make testlinked_s

Compile with essestial flags and sanitizers while producing useful debugging information.

  make testlinked_v

Compile into production-ready code.

  make testlinked

Compile for all the stages mentioned above: This will generate three different executables.

  make all

Run the test (If Valgrind is supported): This will compile the code, run all the test cases, and run Valgrind to detect memory-related errors.

  make run

Run the test (If Valgrind is not supported): This will compile the code, run all the test cases, and skip the Valgrind check.

  make run_no_val

Clean up all the executables generated.

  make clean

ADT Interface

Please refer to lisp.h for more detail.

Function name	Meaning
lisp_atom	Appends an element to the end of the list
lisp_cons	Returns a new list containing the car as one list input and the cdr as another list input
lisp_car	Returns the car (1st) component of the input list
lisp_cdr	Returns the cdr (all but the 1st) component of the input list
lisp_getval	Returns the data/value stored in the cons input list
lisp_copy	Returns a deep copy of the input list
lisp_tostring	Returns stringified version of list
lisp_fromstring	Builds a new list based on the input string
lisp_isatomic	Returns a boolean depending on whether the input list points to an atom
lisp_length	Returns number of components in the list
lisp_list	Returns a new list from a set of input lists
lisp_reduce	Allows a user defined function input to be applied to each atom in the input list
lisp_free	Clears up all space used

Available data structures

Name	Header	Storage type	Requires malloc/free
lisp	specific.h	Objects (void*)	Yes

Data type of the value being stored in lisp could be customized(Default: int):

`lisp.h`

typedef <customized_data_type> atomtype;

Examples

lisp *l1 = lisp_fromstring("(1 2 3 4)");
lisp *l2 = lisp_copy(l1);
lisp *l3 = lisp_cons(l1, l2);
lisp_free(l1);
lisp_free(l2);
lisp_free(l3);

Acknowledgements

This exercise topic was given by the instructor at the University of Bristol: Neill Campbell from the course of Programming in C.
Toolkits: General

smallpaes / CarCdr