Assignment and Local State

We ordinarily view the world as populated by independent objects, each of which has a state that changes over time. An object is said to "have state" if its behavior is influenced by its history. A bank account, for example, has state in that the answer to the question "Can I withdraw $100?" depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions. We can characterize an object's state by one or more state variables , which among them maintain enough information about history to determine the object's current behavior. In a simple banking system, we could characterize the state of an account by a current balance rather than by remembering the entire history of account transactions.

In a system composed of many objects, the objects are rarely completely independent. Each may influence the states of others through interactions, which serve to couple the state variables of one object to those of other objects. Indeed, the view that a system is composed of separate objects is most useful when the state variables of the system can be grouped into closely coupled subsystems that are only loosely coupled to other subsystems.

This view of a system can be a powerful framework for organizing computational models of the system. For such a model to be modular, it should be decomposed into computational objects that model the actual objects in the system. Each computational object must have its own local state variables describing the actual object's state. Since the states of objects in the system being modeled change over time, the state variables of the corresponding computational objects must also change. If we choose to model the flow of time in the system by the elapsed time in the computer, then we must have a way to construct computational objects whose behaviors change as our programs run. In particular, if we wish to model state variables by ordinary symbolic names in the programming language, then the language must provide an assignment operator to enable us to change the value associated with a name.

3.1.1 Local State Variables

Observe that the expression (withdraw 25), evaluated twice, yields different values. This is a new kind of behavior for a procedure. Until now, all our procedures could be viewed as specifications for computing mathematical functions. A call to a procedure computed the value of the function applied to the given arguments, and two calls to the same procedure with the same arguments always produced the same result.1

To implement withdraw, we can use a variable balance to indicate the balance of money in the account and define withdraw as a procedure that accesses balance. The withdraw procedure checks to see if balance is at least as large as the requested amount. If so, withdraw decrements balance by amount and returns the new value of balance. Otherwise, withdraw returns the Insufficient funds message. Here are the definitions of balance and withdraw:

Decrementing balance is accomplished by the expression

This uses the set! special form, whose syntax is

Here is a symbol and is any expression. Set! changes so that its value is the result obtained by evaluating . In the case at hand, we are changing balance so that its new value will be the result of subtracting amount from the previous value of balance.2

withdraw also uses the begin special form to cause two expressions to be evaluated in the case where the if test is true: first decrementing balance and then returning the value of balance. In general, evaluating the expression

causes the expressions <exp_1> through <exp_k> to be evaluated in sequence and the value of the final expression to be returned as the value of the entire begin form.3

Although withdraw works as desired, the variable balance presents a problem. As specified above, balance is a name defined in the global environment and is freely accessible to be examined or modified by any procedure. It would be much better if we could somehow make balance internal to withdraw, so that withdraw would be the only procedure that could access balance directly and any other procedure could access balance only indirectly (through calls to withdraw). This would more accurately model the notion that balance is a local state variable used by withdraw to keep track of the state of the account.

We can make balance internal to withdraw by rewriting the definition as follows:

What we have done here is use let to establish an environment with a local variable balance, bound to the initial value 100. Within this local environment, we use lambda to create a procedure that takes amount as an argument and behaves like our previous withdraw procedure. This procedure – returned as the result of evaluating the let expression – is new-withdraw, which behaves in precisely the same way as withdraw but whose variable balance is not accessible by any other procedure.4

Combining set! with local variables is the general programming technique we will use for constructing computational objects with local state. Unfortunately, using this technique raises a serious problem: When we first introduced procedures, we also introduced the substitution model of evaluation (section 1.1.5) to provide an interpretation of what procedure application means. We said that applying a procedure should be interpreted as evaluating the body of the procedure with the formal parameters replaced by their values. The trouble is that, as soon as we introduce assignment into our language, substitution is no longer an adequate model of procedure application. (We will see why this is so in section 3.1.3.) As a consequence, we technically have at this point no way to understand why the new-withdraw procedure behaves as claimed above. In order to really understand a procedure such as new-withdraw, we will need to develop a new model of procedure application. In section 3.2 we will introduce such a model, together with an explanation of set! and local variables. First, however, we examine some variations on the theme established by new-withdraw.

The following procedure, make-withdraw, creates ``withdrawal processors.'' The formal parameter balance in make-withdraw specifies the initial amount of money in the account.5

make-withdraw can be used as follows to create two objects W1 and W2:

Observe that W1 and W2 are completely independent objects, each with its own local state variable balance. Withdrawals from one do not affect the other.

We can also create objects that handle deposits as well as withdrawals, and thus we can represent simple bank accounts. Here is a procedure that returns a ``bank-account object'' with a specified initial balance:

Each call to make-account sets up an environment with a local state variable balance. Within this environment, make-account defines procedures deposit and withdraw that access balance and an additional procedure dispatch that takes a ``message'' as input and returns one of the two local procedures. The dispatch procedure itself is returned as the value that represents the bank-account object. This is precisely the message-passing style of programming that we saw in section 2.4.3, although here we are using it in conjunction with the ability to modify local variables.

make-account can be used as follows:

Each call to acc returns the locally defined deposit or withdraw procedure, which is then applied to the specified amount. As was the case with make-withdraw, another call to make-account

will produce a completely separate account object, which maintains its own local balance.

then the sequence of values $x_1, x_2, x_3, \ldots$ will have the desired statistical properties.6

We can implement rand as a procedure with a local state variable $x$ that is initialized to some fixed value random-init. Each call to rand computes rand-update of the current value of $x$, returns this as the random number, and also stores this as the new value of $x$.

Of course, we could generate the same sequence of random numbers without using assignment by simply calling rand-update directly. However, this would mean that any part of our program that used random numbers would have to explicitly remember the current value of x to be passed as an argument to rand-update. To realize what an annoyance this would be, consider using random numbers to implement a technique called Monte Carlo simulation .

The Monte Carlo method consists of choosing sample experiments at random from a large set and then making deductions on the basis of the probabilities estimated from tabulating the results of those experiments. For example, we can approximate $\pi$ using the fact that $\frac{6}{\pi^2}$ is the probability that two integers chosen at random will have no factors in common; that is, that their greatest common divisor will be $1$.7 To obtain the approximation to $\pi$, we perform a large number of experiments. In each experiment we choose two integers at random and perform a test to see if their GCD is $1$. The fraction of times that the test is passed gives us our estimate of $\frac{6}{\pi^2}$, and from this we obtain our approximation to $\pi$.

The heart of our program is a procedure monte-carlo, which takes as arguments the number of times to try an experiment, together with the experiment, represented as a no-argument procedure that will return either true or false each time it is run. monte-carlo runs the experiment for the designated number of trials and returns a number telling the fraction of the trials in which the experiment was found to be true.

Now let us try the same computation using rand-update directly rather than rand, the way we would be forced to proceed if we did not use assignment to model local state:

While the program is still simple, it betrays some painful breaches of modularity. In our first version of the program, using rand, we can express the Monte Carlo method directly as a general monte-carlo procedure that takes as an argument an arbitrary experiment procedure. In our second version of the program, with no local state for the random-number generator, random-gcd-test must explicitly manipulate the random numbers x1 and x2 and recycle x2 through the iterative loop as the new input to rand-update. This explicit handling of the random numbers intertwines the structure of accumulating test results with the fact that our particular experiment uses two random numbers, whereas other Monte Carlo experiments might use one random number or three. Even the top-level procedure estimate-pi has to be concerned with supplying an initial random number. The fact that the random-number generator's insides are leaking out into other parts of the program makes it difficult for us to isolate the Monte Carlo idea so that it can be applied to other tasks. In the first version of the program, assignment encapsulates the state of the random-number generator within the rand procedure, so that the details of random-number generation remain independent of the rest of the program.

The general phenomenon illustrated by the Monte Carlo example is this: From the point of view of one part of a complex process, the other parts appear to change with time. They have hidden time-varying local state. If we wish to write computer programs whose structure reflects this decomposition, we make computational objects (such as bank accounts and random-number generators) whose behavior changes with time. We model state with local state variables, and we model the changes of state with assignments to those variables.

It is tempting to conclude this discussion by saying that, by introducing assignment and the technique of hiding state in local variables, we are able to structure systems in a more modular fashion than if all state had to be manipulated explicitly, by passing additional parameters. Unfortunately, as we shall see, the story is not so simple.

As we have seen, the set! operation enables us to model objects that have local state. However, this advantage comes at a price. Our programming language can no longer be interpreted in terms of the substitution model of procedure application that we introduced in section 1.1.5. Moreover, no simple model with ``nice'' mathematical properties can be an adequate framework for dealing with objects and assignment in programming languages.

So long as we do not use assignments, two evaluations of the same procedure with the same arguments will produce the same result, so that procedures can be viewed as computing mathematical functions. Programming without any use of assignments, as we did throughout the first two chapters of this book, is accordingly known as functional programming .

To understand how assignment complicates matters, consider a simplified version of the make-withdraw procedure of section 3.1.1 that does not bother to check for an insufficient amount:

Compare this procedure with the following make-decrementer procedure, which does not use set!:

make-decrementer returns a procedure that subtracts its input from a designated amount balance, but there is no accumulated effect over successive calls, as with make-simplified-withdraw:

We can use the substitution model to explain how make-decrementer works. For instance, let us analyze the evaluation of the expression

We first simplify the operator of the combination by substituting 25 for balance in the body of make-decrementer. This reduces the expression to

Now we apply the operator by substituting 20 for amount in the body of the lambda expression:

The final answer is 5.

Observe, however, what happens if we attempt a similar substitution analysis with make-simplified-withdraw:

We first simplify the operator by substituting 25 for balance in the body of make-simplified-withdraw. This reduces the expression to 9

Now we apply the operator by substituting 20 for amount in the body of the lambda expression:

If we adhered to the substitution model, we would have to say that the meaning of the procedure application is to first set balance to 5 and then return 25 as the value of the expression. This gets the wrong answer. In order to get the correct answer, we would have to somehow distinguish the first occurrence of balance (before the effect of the set!) from the second occurrence of balance (after the effect of the set!), and the substitution model cannot do this.

The trouble here is that substitution is based ultimately on the notion that the symbols in our language are essentially names for values. But as soon as we introduce set! and the idea that the value of a variable can change, a variable can no longer be simply a name. Now a variable somehow refers to a place where a value can be stored, and the value stored at this place can change. In section 3.2 we will see how environments play this role of "place" in our computational model.

Sameness and change

The issue surfacing here is more profound than the mere breakdown of a particular model of computation. As soon as we introduce change into our computational models, many notions that were previously straightforward become problematical. Consider the concept of two things being "the same."

Suppose we call make-decrementer twice with the same argument to create two procedures:

Are D1 and D2 the same? An acceptable answer is yes, because D1 and D2 have the same computational behavior---each is a procedure that subtracts its input from 25. In fact, D1 could be substituted for D2 in any computation without changing the result.

Contrast this with making two calls to make-simplified-withdraw:

Are W1 and W2 the same? Surely not, because calls to W1 and W2 have distinct effects, as shown by the following sequence of interactions:

Even though W1 and W2 are "equal" in the sense that they are both created by evaluating the same expression, (make-simplified-withdraw 25), it is not true that W1 could be substituted for W2 in any expression without changing the result of evaluating the expression.

A language that supports the concept that "equals can be substituted for equals" in an expresssion without changing the value of the expression is said to be referentially transparent . Referential transparency is violated when we include set! in our computer language. This makes it tricky to determine when we can simplify expressions by substituting equivalent expressions. Consequently, reasoning about programs that use assignment becomes drastically more difficult.

Once we forgo referential transparency, the notion of what it means for computational objects to be "the same" becomes difficult to capture in a formal way. Indeed, the meaning of "same" in the real world that our programs model is hardly clear in itself. In general, we can determine that two apparently identical objects are indeed "the same one" only by modifying one object and then observing whether the other object has changed in the same way. But how can we tell if an object has "changed" other than by observing the "same" object twice and seeing whether some property of the object differs from one observation to the next? Thus, we cannot determine "change" without some a priori notion of "sameness," and we cannot determine sameness without observing the effects of change.

As an example of how this issue arises in programming, consider the situation where Peter and Paul have a bank account with $100 in it. There is a substantial difference between modeling this as

and modeling it as

In the first situation, the two bank accounts are distinct. Transactions made by Peter will not affect Paul's account, and vice versa. In the second situation, however, we have defined paul-acc to be the same thing as peter-acc. In effect, Peter and Paul now have a joint bank account, and if Peter makes a withdrawal from peter-acc Paul will observe less money in paul-acc. These two similar but distinct situations can cause confusion in building computational models. With the shared account, in particular, it can be especially confusing that there is one object (the bank account) that has two different names (peter-acc and paul-acc); if we are searching for all the places in our program where paul-acc can be changed, we must remember to look also at things that change peter-acc.10

With reference to the above remarks on "sameness" and "change," observe that if Peter and Paul could only examine their bank balances, and could not perform operations that changed the balance, then the issue of whether the two accounts are distinct would be moot. In general, so long as we never modify data objects, we can regard a compound data object to be precisely the totality of its pieces. For example, a rational number is determined by giving its numerator and its denominator. But this view is no longer valid in the presence of change, where a compound data object has an ``identity'' that is something different from the pieces of which it is composed. A bank account is still ``the same'' bank account even if we change the balance by making a withdrawal; conversely, we could have two different bank accounts with the same state information. This complication is a consequence, not of our programming language, but of our perception of a bank account as an object. We do not, for example, ordinarily regard a rational number as a changeable object with identity, such that we could change the numerator and still have ``the same''rational number.

Pitfalls of imperative programming

In contrast to functional programming, programming that makes extensive use of assignment is known as imperative programming . In addition to raising complications about computational models, programs written in imperative style are susceptible to bugs that cannot occur in functional programs. For example, recall the iterative factorial program from section 1.2.1:

Instead of passing arguments in the internal iterative loop, we could adopt a more imperative style by using explicit assignment to update the values of the variables product and counter:

This does not change the results produced by the program, but it does introduce a subtle trap. How do we decide the order of the assignments? As it happens, the program is correct as written. But writing the assignments in the opposite order

would have produced a different, incorrect result. In general, programming with assignment forces us to carefully consider the relative orders of the assignments to make sure that each statement is using the correct version of the variables that have been changed. This issue simply does not arise in functional programs.11

The complexity of imperative programs becomes even worse if we consider applications in which several processes execute concurrently. We will return to this in section 3.4. First, however, we will address the issue of providing a computational model for expressions that involve assignment, and explore the uses of objects with local state in designing simulations.

Based on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a work at https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/.