Change coins of different currencies
Consider the change-counting program of section 1.2.2. It would be nice to be able to easily change the currency used by the program, so that we could compute the number of ways to change a British pound, for example. As the program is written, the knowledge of the currency is distributed partly into the procedure
first-denomination
and partly into the procedure
count-change
(which knows that there are five kinds of U.S. coins). It would be nicer to be able to supply a list of coins to be used for making change.
We want to rewrite the procedure
cc
so that its second argument is a list of the values of the coins to use rather than an integer specifying which coins to use. We could then have lists that defined each kind of currency:
(define us-coins (list 50 25 10 5 1))
(define uk-coins (list 100 50 20 10 5 2 1 0.5))
We could then call
cc
as follows:
(cc 100 us-coins)
292
To do this will require changing the program
cc
somewhat. It will still have the same form, but it will access its second argument differently, as follows:
(define (cc amount coin-values)
(cond ((= amount 0) 1)
((or (< amount 0) (no-more? coin-values)) 0)
(else
(+ (cc amount
(except-first-denomination coin-values))
(cc (- amount
(first-denomination coin-values))
coin-values)))))
Define the procedures
first-denomination
,
except-first-denomination
, and
no-more?
in terms of primitive operations on list structures. Does the order of the list
coin-values
affect the answer produced by
cc
? Why or why not?