Learning Exercise
When recursing through enumerables (lists, bitstrings, strings), there are often two concerns:
To deal with these concerns an accumulator may be used.
An accumulator is a variable that is passed along in addition to the data. It is used to pass the current state of the function's execution, from function call to function call, until the base case is reached. In the base case, the accumulator is used to return the final value of the recursive function call.
Accumulators should be initialized by the function's author, not the function's user. To achieve this, declare two functions - a public function that takes just the necessary data as arguments and initializes the accumulator, and a private function that also takes an accumulator. In Elixir, it is a common pattern to prefix the private function's name with do_.
# Count the length of a list without an accumulator
def count([]), do: 0
def count([_head | tail]), do: 1 + count(tail)
# Count the length of a list with an accumulator
def count(list), do: do_count(list, 0)
defp do_count([], count), do: count
defp do_count([_head | tail], count), do: do_count(tail, count + 1)
The usage of an accumulator allows us to turn recursive functions into tail-recursive functions. A function is tail-recursive if the last thing executed by the function is a call to itself.
In your DNA research lab, you have been working through various ways to compress your research data to save storage space. One teammate suggests converting the DNA data to a binary representation:
| Nucleic Acid | Code |
|---|---|
| a space | 0000 |
| A | 0001 |
| C | 0010 |
| G | 0100 |
| T | 1000 |
You ponder this, as it will potentially halve the required data storage costs, but at the expense of human readability. You decide to write a module to encode and decode your data to benchmark your savings.
Implement encode_nucleotide/1 to accept the code point for the nucleic acid and return the integer value of the encoded code.
DNA.encode_nucleotide(?A)
# => 1
# (which is equal to 0b0001)
Implement decode_nucleotide/1 to accept the integer value of the encoded code and return the code point for the nucleic acid.
DNA.decode_nucleotide(0b0001)
# => 65
# (which is equal to ?A)
Implement encode/1 to accept a charlist representing nucleic acids and gaps and return a bitstring of the encoded data.
DNA.encode(~c"AC GT")
# => <<18, 4, 8::size(4)>>
Implement decode/1 to accept a bitstring representing nucleic acids and gaps and return the decoded data as a charlist.
DNA.decode(<<132, 2, 1::size(4)>>)
# => ~c"TG CA"
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