Menu

Official website

Literal data structures in Scala

Elty

19 Jul 2010

min read

java scala en

Here is an example of a striking difference in verbosity between Java and Scala. Some languages make it easy to concisely declare data structures in your code. Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP all do. Java doesn’t.

Let’s say you would like to maintain a simple lookup table in your code, to map from country code to country name. And to make it more interesting, let’s say you want to have the country names in a couple of different languages.

In Scala, this could look like the following:

val countryNames = Map(
  "NL" -> Map("nl" -> "Nederland", "en" -> "The Netherlands", "fr" -> "Les Pays-Bas"),
  "UK" -> Map("nl" -> "Het Verenigd Koninkrijk", "en" -> "The United Kingdom", "fr" -> "Le Royaume-Uni"),
  "FR" -> Map("nl" -> "Frankrijk", "en" -> "France", "fr" -> "France"),
  "UNKNOWN" -> Map("nl" -> "[onbekend land]", "en" -> "[unknown country]", "fr" -> "[pays inconnu]")
  )
val here = countryNames("NL")("en")
val there = countryNames.get("DE").getOrElse(countryNames("UNKNOWN"))("en")

println("We're here in "+here+".")
println("We don't know about "+ there)

If you put this in a file example.scala and run it using scala example.scala then it will print:

We're here in The Netherlands.
We don't know about [unknown country]

Compare this with the java version:

// imports, class, and main method omitted
Map<String, Map<String, String>> countryNames = new HashMap<String, Map<String, String>>();
Map<String, String> nl = new HashMap<String, String>();
nl.put("nl", "Nederland");
nl.put("en", "The Netherlands");
nl.put("fr", "Les Pays-Bas");
countryNames.put("NL", nl);
// …10 more lines…
Map<String, String> unk = new HashMap<String, String>();
unk.put("nl", "[onbekend land]");
unk.put("en", "[unknown country]");
unk.put("fr", "[pays inconnu]");
countryNames.put("UNKNOWN", unk);

String here = countryNames.get("NL").get("en");
Map<String, String> tmp = countryNames.get("DE");
String there = tmp == null ? countryNames.get("UNKNOWN").get("en") : tmp.get("en");

out.println("We're here in "+here+".");
out.println("We don't know about "+ there);

One difference between the two languages is that the types seem to be largely missing in the Scala version, it looks like a weakly typed language. But the types are there, they are just inferred by the compiler.
We could have written

val countryNames: Map[String, Map[String,String]] = …

Now let’s say that we’re setting the list of languages in stone and instead of the inner maps we want to use objects with methods for each language:

case class Names(nl: String, en: String, fr: String)

val countryNames2: Map[String,Names] = Map(
  "NL" -> Names("Nederland", "The Netherlands", "Les Pays-Bas"),
  "UK" -> Names("Het Verenigd Koninkrijk", "The United Kingdom", "Le Royaume-Uni"),
  "FR" -> Names("Frankrijk", "France", "France"),
  "UNKNOWN" -> Names("[onbekend land]", "[unknown country]", "[pays inconnu]")
  )

val holiday = "We gaan op vakantie naar "+countryNames2("FR").nl
println(holiday)
// prints: We gaan op vakantie naar Frankrijk

Defining the Names class took just one line. What that line does is define a class with:

  • a 3-argument constructor

  • a singleton method which calls the constructor

  • 3 public accessor methods

  • a toString() method

  • implementations of equals() and hashCode()

  • a few other tricks

Scala makes for code that’s a pleasure to read and write, because you can skip the boilerplate.

expand_less