Hidden features of Scala

Question

Okay, I had to add one more. Every Regex object in Scala has an extractor (see answer from oxbox_lakes above) that gives you access to the match groups. So you can do something like:

// Regex to split a date in the format Y/M/D.
val regex = "(\\d+)/(\\d+)/(\\d+)".r
val regex(year, month, day) = "2010/1/13"

The second line looks confusing if you're not used to using pattern matching and extractors. Whenever you define a val or var, what comes after the keyword is not simply an identifier but rather a pattern. That's why this works:

val (a, b, c) = (1, 3.14159, "Hello, world")

The right hand expression creates a Tuple3[Int, Double, String] which can match the pattern (a, b, c).

Most of the time your patterns use extractors that are members of singleton objects. For example, if you write a pattern like

Some(value)

then you're implicitly calling the extractor Some.unapply.

But you can also use class instances in patterns, and that is what's happening here. The val regex is an instance of Regex, and when you use it in a pattern, you're implicitly calling regex.unapplySeq (unapply versus unapplySeq is beyond the scope of this answer), which extracts the match groups into a Seq[String], the elements of which are assigned in order to the variables year, month, and day.

Structural type definitions - i.e. a type described by what methods it supports. For example:

object Closer {
    def using(closeable: { def close(): Unit }, f: => Unit) {
      try { 
        f
      } finally { closeable.close }
    }
}

Notice that the type of the parameter closeable is not defined other than it has a close method

Type-Constructor Polymorphism (a.k.a. higher-kinded types)

Without this feature you can, for example, express the idea of mapping a function over a list to return another list, or mapping a function over a tree to return another tree. But you can't express this idea generally without higher kinds.

With higher kinds, you can capture the idea of any type that's parameterised with another type. A type constructor that takes one parameter is said to be of kind (*->*). For example, List. A type constructor that returns another type constructor is said to be of kind (*->*->*). For example, Function1. But in Scala, we have higher kinds, so we can have type constructors that are parameterised with other type constructors. So they're of kinds like ((*->*)->*).

For example:

trait Functor[F[_]] {
  def fmap[A, B](f: A => B, fa: F[A]): F[B]
}

Now, if you have a Functor[List], you can map over lists. If you have a Functor[Tree], you can map over trees. But more importantly, if you have Functor[A] for any A of kind (*->*), you can map a function over A.

Extractors which allow you to replace messy if-elseif-else style code with patterns. I know that these are not exactly hidden but I've been using Scala for a few months without really understanding the power of them. For (a long) example I can replace:

val code: String = ...
val ps: ProductService = ...
var p: Product = null
if (code.endsWith("=")) {
  p = ps.findCash(code.substring(0, 3)) //e.g. USD=, GBP= etc
}
else if (code.endsWith(".FWD")) {
  //e.g. GBP20090625.FWD
  p = ps.findForward(code.substring(0,3), code.substring(3, 9))
}
else {
  p = ps.lookupProductByRic(code)
}

With this, which is much clearer in my opinion

implicit val ps: ProductService = ...
val p = code match {
  case SyntheticCodes.Cash(c) => c
  case SyntheticCodes.Forward(f) => f
  case _ => ps.lookupProductByRic(code)
}

I have to do a bit of legwork in the background...

object SyntheticCodes {
  // Synthetic Code for a CashProduct
  object Cash extends (CashProduct => String) {
    def apply(p: CashProduct) = p.currency.name + "="

    //EXTRACTOR
    def unapply(s: String)(implicit ps: ProductService): Option[CashProduct] = {
      if (s.endsWith("=") 
        Some(ps.findCash(s.substring(0,3))) 
      else None
    }
  }
  //Synthetic Code for a ForwardProduct
  object Forward extends (ForwardProduct => String) {
    def apply(p: ForwardProduct) = p.currency.name + p.date.toString + ".FWD"

    //EXTRACTOR
    def unapply(s: String)(implicit ps: ProductService): Option[ForwardProduct] = {
      if (s.endsWith(".FWD") 
        Some(ps.findForward(s.substring(0,3), s.substring(3, 9)) 
      else None
    }
  }

But the legwork is worth it for the fact that it separates a piece of business logic into a sensible place. I can implement my Product.getCode methods as follows..

class CashProduct {
  def getCode = SyntheticCodes.Cash(this)
}

class ForwardProduct {
  def getCode = SyntheticCodes.Forward(this)     
}