CS2500: Problem Set 6

Due: Tuesday, February 23 at 11:59 PM

This assignment is to be completed with your partner.

Purpose

Assignment goal: To continue using self-referential unions, including writing some functions that consume more than one self-referential union.

Problems

alpaca! The Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association needs your help! They’re having trouble using the database of detailed pedigree records that they keep for all registered alpacas.

But first, some background. For every alpaca in the registry, they keep several different pieces of information:

name
sex
date of birth
fleece color
sire (father), if known
dam (mother), if known

Unsurprisingly, AOBA uses DrScheme to store and query the alpaca registry, with the following data definitions:

;; A Sex is one of:
;; -- "female"
;; -- "male"

;; A DoB is (make-date Year Month Day)
;;   where
;; Year is an Integer in [1900, 2010]
;; Month is an Integer in [1, 12]
;; Day is an Integer in [1, 31]
(define-struct date (year month day))

;; An Alpaca is one of:
;; -- (make-alpaca String Sex DoB Color Alpaca Alpaca)
;; -- "unknown"
(define-struct alpaca (name sex dob color sire dam))

An an example, here’s the representation of the record for Irene of Acorn Alpacas:

(define irene
  (make-alpaca "Irene of Acorn Alpacas"
               "female"
               (make-date 2007 5 21)
               "silver"
               (make-alpaca "MA Sylvan"
                            "male"
                            (make-date 2001 5 16)
                            "black"
                            "unknown"
                            "unknown")
               (make-alpaca "MFA Independence"
                            "female"
                            (make-date 2002 7 2)
                            "black"
                            (make-alpaca "Jericho de Chuchata"
                                         "male"
                                         (make-date 1997 11 23)
                                         "black"
                                         "unknown"
                                         "unknown)
                            (make-alpaca "Dana Andrews"
                                         "female"
                                         (make-date 1996 8 14)
                                         "silver"
                                         "unknown"
                                         "unknown")))

First, AOBA would like a program to make a rather simple query: Given an alpaca, they would like to find out the names of all the female-line ancestors of the given alpaca in a list, youngest to oldest, and including the given alpaca. So for example, given the structure for Irene above, it should return the list
```
(cons "Irene of Acorn Alpacas"
      (cons "MFA Independence"
            (cons "Dana Andrews" empty)))
        
```
which contains Irene's name, her mother's name, and her grandmother's name, and then stops because her great grandmother is unknown.

Design the function female-line. (You probably need a new data definition in order to write the correct contract.)
Many breeders raise alpacas for their fleece, which comes in a wide variety of colors and may be made into a wide variety of textiles. Some breeders are interested in breeding alpacas with new colors and patterns, and to do so, they need to understand how fleece colors and patterns are inherited.

You can help them by designing a function has-color? that takes an alpaca pedigree and a color, and reports whether or not that color appears anywhere in the pedigree tree.
AOBA is worried about fraud in their registry. Eventually they’ll send investigators into the field, but first they’d like to run a simple sanity check on the database. Given the pedigree record for an alpaca, there are two simple errors that you can find:
- Some alpaca in the tree has a birthday before one of his or her parents.
- Some alpaca in the tree has a male alpaca listed as dam or a female alpaca listed as sire.
Design a function pedigree-error? that returns true if a given Alpaca has one of those two obvious errors in his or her pedigree, and false otherwise.

(For all other problems in this assignment, you may safely assume that all alpaca records are valid, in the sense that pedigree-error? answers false for them. In the next problem, for example, it will save you trouble if you don’t have to consider the possibility that any alpaca’s date of birth could precede its parents’.)
Tracing back an alpaca’s ancestry as far as possible is a point of pride in the alpaca-raising community. Design a function oldest-ancestor that, given an alpaca’s pedigree record, returns its oldest known ancestor.

Hint: If neither the sire or dam is known, then an alpaca is its own oldest ancestor. Programmers call this a degenerate or trivial case.
AOBA also wants a way to list all the known ancestors of a given alpaca (including the given alpaca) in reverse birth order. For example, for Irene, the result would be a list starting with Irene’s record, followed by MFA Independence (DOB 7/2/2002), MA Sylvan (DOB 5/16/2001), Jericho de Chuchata (DOB 11/23/1997), and Dana Andrews (DOB 8/14/1996).

Design a function all-ancestors/sorted to perform this task.

Hint: In order to do so, you will need a data definition for a list of alpacas (the conventional one will do), and you will likely need a helper function merge-alpacas that, given two sorted lists of alpacas, merges them into a single sorted list of alpacas. (See HTDP sections 17.1–17.3 for how to design a template for this.)
Bonus: Design an alpaca pedigree explorer. This should display pedigree information on an alpaca and allow the user to call up the information on other alpacas in a way you consider appropriate. (For example, clicking the alpaca’s dam might call up her record.) Be creative.

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Last updated 17 February 2010.