I have a series of expressions to convert from postfix to prefix and I thought that I would try to write a program to do it for me in DrRacket. I am getting stuck with some of the more complex ones such as (10 (1 2 3 +) ^).
I have the very simple case down for (1 2 \*) → (\* 1 2). I have set these expressions up as a list and I know that you have to use cdr/car and recursion to do it but that is where I get stuck.
My inputs will be something along the lines of '(1 2 +).
I have for simple things such as '(1 2 +):
(define ans '())
(define (post-pre lst)
(set! ans (list (last lst) (first lst) (second lst))))
For the more complex stuff I have this (which fails to work correctly):
(define ans '())
(define (post-pre-comp lst)
(cond [(pair? (car lst)) (post-pre-comp (car lst))]
[(pair? (cdr lst)) (post-pre-comp (cdr lst))]
[else (set! ans (list (last lst) (first lst) (second lst)))]))
Obviously I am getting tripped up because (cdr lst) will return a pair most of the time. I'm guessing my structure of the else statement is wrong and I need it to be cons instead of list, but I'm not sure how to get that to work properly in this case.
Try something like this:
(define (postfix->prefix expr)
(cond
[(and (list? expr) (not (null? expr)))
(define op (last expr))
(define args (drop-right expr 1))
(cons op (map postfix->prefix args))]
[else expr]))
This operates on the structure recursively by using map to call itself on the arguments to each call.