[plt-scheme] problem with amb macros

Hi Sigrid,

> please excuse my question as it's not about PLT-scheme specific  - I'm a
> complete autodidact studying on my own, trying to solve the SICP
> exercises, and I think this group is very helpful and instructive :-)
> 
> I want to solve the amb exercises in SICP not always using the custom
> amb evaluator from the book, but one of the existing macros (as an
> exercise to employ these macros "in the real world").
> However, with both the amb macro from the Dorai Sitaram book and one
> taken from http://community.schemewiki.org/?amb, I do not get the
> expected behavior when I call (amb) again to get the residual alternatives.
> E.g. in exercise 4.45, there should be 5 alternatives, but I get "amb
> tree exhausted" already when I call (amb) after the first try.
> 
> In general it seems the failure continuations are stored correctly in
> the macros - simple cases like
> 
> 1) (amb 1 2) -> 1
> 2) (amb) -> 2
> 
> work as expected, but for the more complicated cases as the
> language-parsing or the puzzles (e.g., exercise 4.43 in the
> "more-than-one-solution" version) it seems that the macros are not
> really equivalent of the SICP amb evaluator... Is this possible?

Without actually testing the macro, I'd say the intention
of the implementation of http://community.schemewiki.org/?amb
is that you can use with SICP. However, it might be that
solutions are generated in a different order than shown in
SICP.

Do you have a concrete example, that shows where you get
results that differ from your expectation? Can you
perhaps show us what your code for 4.45 looks like?


-- 
Jens Axel Søgaard