Representing an amount of money with specific bills

Question

I want to write a function in Racket which takes an amount of money and a list of specific bill-values, and then returns a list with the amount of bills used of every type t

Answer 1

I think this is the first program I wrote when learning FORTRAN! Here is a version which makes no bones about using everything Racket has to offer (or, at least, everything I know about). As such it's probably a terrible homework solution, and it's certainly prettier than the FORTRAN I wrote in 1984.

Note that this version doesn't search, so it will get remainders even when it does not need to. It never gets a remainder if the lowest denomination is 1, of course.

(define/contract (denominations-of amount denominations)
  ;; split amount into units of denominations, returning the split
  ;; in descending order of denomination, and any remainder (if there is
  ;; no 1 denomination there will generally be a remainder).
  (-> natural-number/c (listof (integer-in 1 #f))
      (values (listof natural-number/c) natural-number/c))
  (let handle-one-denomination ([current amount]
                                [remaining-denominations (sort denominations >)]
                                [so-far '()])
    ;; handle a single denomination: current is the balance,
    ;; remaining-denominations is the denominations left (descending order)
    ;; so-far is the list of amounts of each denomination we've accumulated
    ;; so far, which is in ascending order of denomination
    (if (null? remaining-denominations)
        ;; we are done: return the reversed accumulator and anything left over
        (values (reverse so-far) current)
        (match-let ([(cons first-denomination rest-of-the-denominations)
                     remaining-denominations])
          (if (> first-denomination current)
              ;; if the first denomination is more than the balance, just
              ;; accumulate a 0 for it and loop on the rest
              (handle-one-denomination current rest-of-the-denominations
                                       (cons 0 so-far))
              ;; otherwise work out how much of it we need and how much is left
              (let-values ([(q r)
                            (quotient/remainder current first-denomination)])
                ;; and loop on the remainder accumulating the number of bills
                ;; we needed
                (handle-one-denomination r rest-of-the-denominations
                                         (cons q so-far))))))))