Functional Scala: Tinkerbell, Frogs and Lists

Welcome to another episode of Functional Scala!

What do you know about Frogs? Well, i mean beyond the most common facts you learn from books. One way to learn more about Frogs might be to dissect one, as you may have done back in school. That would be the analytic way. But there’s a better way: if you really want to learn about the nature of a frog, you should build one! By building a being that has froglike characteristics, you’re going to learn what makes a frog a frog and how frogs are adapted to their particular environment. It’s a perfect example of learning by synthesis!

Well, as this isn’t a series about biology but about Functional Programming with Scala, we’re going to focus on another research object, which will be list-like data structures in a functional environment. We’re going to construct a simple, functional list type and explore its characteristics along the way. So let’s start and play Tinkerbell …

Functional Scala: Expressions, Extensions and Extractors

Welcome back to another episode of Functional Scala.

This one is the sequel to our extended sample on representing and resolving arithmetic expressions using algebraic datatypes and pattern matching. In this second part i try to answer a legitimate question: what are the advantages and disadvantages of algebraic datatypes (consisting of pure data, no behaviour), espacially if we wanna expand our expression language  – and what’s that all to do with the visitor pattern?

Functional Scala: a little expression language with algebraic datatypes and pattern matching

Welcome to another episode of Functional Scala!

In this episode we’ll going to recap and employ everything we’ve learned so far about algebraic datatypes and pattern matching for implementing a more extensive example. We’ll put all those little pieces together which we’ve discovered so far and see how they work in cooperation for building a little language which allows us to write, pretty print, step-wise reduce and evaluate arbitrary arithmetic expressions (considering addition, subtraction and multiplication on integer values). And as the cherry on top, we’ll discover some new flavour of algebraic datatypes and pattern matching.