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Elements of Programming
book

Elements of Programming

by Paul McJones, Alexander Stepanov
June 2009
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
288 pages
5h 59m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Elements of Programming

Chapter 2

Transformations and Their Orbits

This chapter defines a transformation as a unary regular function from a type to itself. Successive applications of a transformation starting from an initial value determine an orbit of this value. Depending only on the regularity of the transformation and the finiteness of the orbit, we implement an algorithm for determining orbit structures that can be used in different domains. For example, it could be used to detect a cycle in a linked list or to analyze a pseudorandom number generator. We derive an interface to the algorithm as a set of related procedures and definitions for their arguments and results. This analysis of an orbit-structure algorithm allows us to introduce our approach to programming ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780321643926Purchase book