Tag: Project Euler

My second Project Euler solution.
Project Euler No. 2
This was a little tougher to solve than No. 1. I decided to use recursion to solve it, and as I haven’t had to write anything that used recursion since I was at Uni, it took me a while go remember how to do it. Also, it was an elisp learning exercise.
Things I learnt:

1. successive statements inside an if statement need to be inside a progn.
2. passing in the evens variable was the way to solve this without needing a static variable. Thanks to spacebat for that one. Apparently that is the functional programming way of doing things.

;; Project Euler no 2. Calculate the sum of all even terms in the
;; fibonacci sequence of numbers that do not exceed 4,000,000
(defun fibonacci (x y)
  "calculate the next number in the fibonacci sequenece"
  (+ x y))
(defun fibonacci-sum  (fib1 fib2 target &optional evens)
  "find the next fibonacci number bigger than target, given fib1 and fib2"
  (unless evens
    (setq evens 0))
  (let ((fib3 (fibonacci fib1 fib2 ))
        )
    (if (<=  fib3 target)
        (progn (if (zerop (mod fib3 2))
                   (setq evens (+ fib3 evens)))
               (message (format "fib3 is: %d, evens: %d" fib3 evens))
               (setq fib3  (fibonacci-sum fib2 fib3 target evens)))
      (format "fib3: %d > %d target, evens = %d" fib3 target evens)
      )
    )
  )
(fibonacci-sum 0 1 4000000)