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579

answers:

2

I'm trying to understand the implementation of Lists in Scala. In particular I'm trying to get my head around how you can write match expressions using an infix operator, for example:

a match {
  case Nil => "An empty list"
  case x :: Nil => "A list without a tail"
  case x :: xs => "A list with a tail"
}

How is the match expression allowed to be x :: xs rather than List(x, xs)?

+5  A: 

I believe :: is actually a class (which is a subclass of List), so saying x :: xs is mostly equivalent to List(x, xs).

You can do this with other case classes that have operator names. For instance:

case class %%%(x: Int, y: Int)

a match {
  case x %%% y => x + y
}
Jay Conrod
+6  A: 

Jay Conrad's answer is almost right. The important thing is that somewhere there is an object named :: which implements the unapply method, returning type Option[(A, List[A])]. Thusly:

object :: {
  def unapply[A](ls: List[A]) = {
    if (ls.empty) None
    else Some((ls.head, ls.tail))
  }
}

// case objects get unapply for free
case object Nil extends List[Nothing]

In the case of :: and List, this object happens to come out of the fact that :: is a case class which extends the List trait. However, as the above example shows, it doesn't have to be a case class at all.

Daniel Spiewak