What is a DList?

Question

I tried googling for this but all I got were stories about minor celebrities. Given the lack of documentation, what is a DList?

Answer 1

It's a data type in the non-canonical scalaz package, useful for typed lists with constant-time access at both ends. (The trick is to google for "scala" AND "dlist".)

Answer 2

From the project page of scalaz:

DList, a data type for representing elements of the same type with constant time append/prepend operations.

Answer 3

It's a Different List, along the lines of "Difference List as functions"

scala> val (l1, l2, l3) = (List(1, 2, 3), List(4, 5, 6), List(7, 8, 9))
l1: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3)
l2: List[Int] = List(4, 5, 6)
l3: List[Int] = List(7, 8, 9)

Efficient prepending:

scala> l1 ::: l2 ::: l3
res8: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Inefficient appending. This creates an intermediate list (l1 ++ l2), then ((l1 ++ l2) ++ l3)

scala> l1 ++ l2 ++ l3  // inefficient
res9: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

DList stores up the appends, and only needs to create one complete list, effectively invoking:

scala> List(l1, l2, l3) reduceRight ( _ ::: _) 
res10: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)