Luet oppimateriaalin englanninkielistä versiota. Mainitsit kuitenkin taustakyselyssä osaavasi suomea. Siksi suosittelemme, että käytät suomenkielistä versiota, joka on testatumpi ja hieman laajempi ja muutenkin mukava.

Suomenkielinen materiaali kyllä esittelee englanninkielisetkin termit. Myös suomenkielisessä materiaalissa käytetään ohjelmaprojektien koodissa englanninkielisiä nimiä kurssin alkupään johdantoesimerkkejä lukuunottamatta.

Voit vaihtaa kieltä A+:n valikon yläreunassa olevasta painikkeesta. Tai tästä: Vaihda suomeksi.

Chapter 6.3: Collections and Snakes

About This Page

Questions Answered: How do higher-order methods make collections easy and pleasant to work with?

Topics: Methods on collections. We’ll also continue to use function literals a lot.

What Will I Do? Read and program.

Rough Estimate of Workload:? Three or four hours.

Points Available: A30 + B100.

Related Projects: Snake (new), Election.

Introduction

This chapter will introduce you to a diverse set of higher-order methods that you can use instead of loops, or in combination with them. All of these methods have a couple of things in common: they are provided by the collection classes of the Scala API and they take in functions that specify what to do with the elements of the target collection. The methods respond to needs such as:

• How to repeat an operation on each element of a collection?
• How to examine a collection’s overall properties (e.g., whether all of its elements are similar to each other in some respect)?
• How to select some of a collection’s elements (e.g., all the elements that match a particular criterion)?
• How to combine elements to produce a result (e.g., the sum of squares of all elements, or a combination of all the pictures in a collection)?
• How to compute a separate result from each of a collection’s element (e.g., given a vector of person objects, produce a vector or their social security numbers)?

We expect that you’ll find the upcoming methods very convenient. You can use them to write code that is expressive and to-the-point. These methods are especially typical of functional programming (more on which in 10.2), whereas imperative programming tends to favor loops.

There’s more

Scala has an extensive collections library: there are lots of different collection types and lots of different methods. This chapter covers a number of highly useful methods but to find all the available ones, you’ll need to see the API documentation.

Much of this chapter consists of small examples of API methods. In that respect, we pick up where we left off in Chapter 4.2, which introduced a variety of first-order methods on collections.

For simplicity, many of the examples below feature integer vectors. However, the same methods work for collections other than vectors and elements other than numbers.

Many of the examples use function literals (Chapter 6.2) — both in the full form and abbreviated with underscores — so before you continue, please ensure that you understand those notations.

Repeating an Operation with foreach

In a sense, the most generic of all the higher-order methods on Scala collections is foreach. As a first example, let’s use this method to print out the squares of each number in a collection.

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
numbers.foreach( n => println(n * n) )100
25
16
25
400

foreach takes in a function that takes in a single element (here: an Int), such as the anonymous function that we have in this example.

As its name suggests, foreach performs the given operation on each element of the collection. In this case, it computes the square of each element and prints it out.

Note: even though the method name contains two English words, it is (against convention and somewhat confusingly) spelled with a lower-case E.

You probably noticed already that foreach does pretty much the same thing as repeatForEachElement, the higher-order function you wrote in Chapter 6.1. The main difference is that foreach is a library method available on all collections, and you can use it in any Scala program.

foreach expects to be given a function that returns Unit. Any function that you pass to foreach should therefore bring about an effect of some sort, such as printing (as above) or modifying an object’s state.

Loops vs. methods on collections

As was already mentioned, the methods in this chapter can be used for similar purposes as loops. This is especially obvious in our first method, foreach. After all, you can also write:

for (n <- numbers) {
  println(n * n)
}

And indeed these two do the same thing:

for (element <- elements) {
  Do something with the element.
}

elements.foreach( element => Do something with the element. )

As a matter of fact, a for loop such as the above is simply a different way of writing a foreach call. The Scala compiler automatically translates it into a method call.

As another example, here is one of the methods from Chapter 5.5’s AuctionHouse class:

def nextDay() = {
  for (current <- this.items) {
    current.advanceOneDay()
  }
}

We could have just as well written:

def nextDay() = {
  this.items.foreach( _.advanceOneDay() )
}

Which one is more elegant and easier to read depends on context and on the programmer’s personal taste.

In O1, we’ll use foreach often, but we’ll continue to use the for loop as well. Feel free to use whichever you prefer, but an educated Scala programmer needs to be familiar with both.

A+ presents the exercise submission form here.

Interlude: Levels of Abstraction

Examining a Collection

Checking properties with exists and forall

The exists method is an easy way to determine whether or not any of the elements in the collection meets a particular criterion:

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
numbers.exists( _ < 0 )res0: Boolean = true
numbers.exists( _ < -100 )res1: Boolean = false

We give exists a function that takes an element and returns a Boolean indicating whether the element meets a particular condition. Here, for instance, we pass in a function that determines whether its parameter is a negative number.

Our example collection contains (at least) one negative element. It doesn’t contain even a single element less than -100.

forall similarly checks whether all the elements of the collection fulfill the given criterion:

numbers.forall( _ > 0 )res2: Boolean = false
numbers.forall( _ > -100 )res3: Boolean = true

In this example, we first checked whether all the elements are positive; they aren’t. Then we determined that all the elements are greater than -100.

Getting to know count, exists, and forall

A+ presents the exercise submission form here.

Question 1

Use the REPL or other means to work out what the count method does. Try numbers.count( _ % 2 == 0 ) and similar commands.

Which of the following claims are correct, assuming that myCriterion is the name of a function and elements is a variable that refers to a collection? (Also assume that myCriterion’s type is compatible with the collection.)

The expression elements.count(myCriterion) >= 0 always evaluates to true.

The expression elements.count(myCriterion) == 0 always has the same value as elements.forall(myCriterion)

The expression elements.count(myCriterion) == 0 always has the same value as !elements.forall(myCriterion)

The expression elements.count(myCriterion) == 0 always has the same value as elements.forall( !myCriterion(_) )

The expression elements.count(myCriterion) == 0 always has the same value as !elements.exists(myCriterion)

The expression elements.count(myCriterion) == 0 always has the same value as elements.exists( !myCriterion(_) )

An afterthought

In the question above, why was one of the expressions written like this?

// Version 1 (which works)
elements.forall( !myCriterion(_) )

Couldn’t we have simply written this?

// Version 2 (which doesn't work)
elements.forall( !myCriterion )

As noted in Chapter 6.2, there are different ways to write a function literal. However, Version 2 doesn’t work, because it doesn’t actually define a function literal.

forall, like many other methods on collections, expects to be given a function that it can apply to each element in turn. However, the expression !myCriterion does not refer to any function, not even if there exists a function named myCriterion.

To pass in the reverse of myCriterion, you need to formulate a function that calls myCriterion and applies the negation operator ! to the result. To that end, you can either use an underscore, as above, or the full arrow notation, as below.

// Version 3 (which works)
elements.forall( elem => !myCriterion(elem) )

Selecting Elements from a Collection

Using find, filter, takeWhile, and dropWhile

The find method goes through the collection and returns the first element it finds that meets the given criterion. For instance, you could look for the first number that’s less than five:

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
numbers.find( _ < 5 )res4: Option[Int] = Some(4)

Note: find returns an Option wrapped around the value that was found. If the search results in a miss, you get None:

numbers.find( _ == 100 )res5: Option[Int] = None

filter is similar to find except that it returns a collection of all the elements that match the criterion. Our vector contains four positive numbers:

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
numbers.filter( _ > 0 )res6: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5)

In Chapter 4.2, you saw a take method that returns a partial collection with the given number of elements from the beginning of the original collection (say, numbers.take(3)). take’s higher-order cousin is takeWhile:

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
numbers.takeWhile( _ >= 5 )res7: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5)

As shown above, the method takes elements from the beginning of the collection until it runs into an element that doesn’t meet the given criterion.

A+ presents the exercise submission form here.

filter vs. filterNot; takeWhile vs. dropWhile

Question 1

Use the REPL or other means to work out what the filterNot method does. You can invoke it just like filter above.

Assume that elements is a variable that refers to a vector. Further assume that we have defined a function named myCriterion whose type is compatible with the collection. Which of the following claims are correct?

The value of the expression elements.filter(myCriterion) is the same as that of elements.filterNot( !myCriterion(_) )

The value of the expression elements.filter(myCriterion) is the same as that of elements.filterNot( myCriterion(_) )

The value of the expression elements.filter(myCriterion) is the same as that of !elements.filterNot( myCriterion(_) )

Question 2

How about dropWhile? You can invoke it just like takeWhile above.

elements.takeWhile(myCriterion) returns a vector that contains exactly those elements that elements.dropWhile( myCriterion(_) ) leaves out.

elements.takeWhile(myCriterion) returns a vector that contains exactly the same elements as the one returned by elements.dropWhile( !myCriterion(_) ).

Assignment: Reimplementing Election (Part 1 of 2)

This was a good activity. My code is so much shorter now.

In Chapter 5.6, you wrote a number of methods for class District in project Election. (If you didn’t, do that now or see the example solution.) At that time, you (probably) used loops to implement the methods.

Rewrite two of the methods, namely printCandidates and candidatesFrom. For each one, there exists a simple implementation that uses one of the methods introduced above. Use those methods instead of for loops.

We’ll get back to the other District methods later.

A+ presents the exercise submission form here.

Mapping a Collection of Elements: map and flatMap

It is remarkably often useful to “map” a collection of elements to another.

The higher-order method map returns a new collection whose elements have been generated by applying map’s parameter function to each of original collection’s elements. In the example below, we use map to compute each element’s absolute value and obtain a new vector that contains each of the results in order:

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
numbers.map( _.abs )res8: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, 20)

The following expression determines, for each element, whether or not it is at least five. The output vector contains the resulting Booleans in order:

numbers.map( _ >= 5 )res9: Vector[Boolean] = Vector(true, true, false, true, false)

You can use map in combination with a wide variety of parameter functions. Like the other methods of this chapter, map is also available on collections other than vectors. For instance, you can call it on the Range object that you get by writing 1 to 10 (Chapter 5.6):

(1 to 10).map( n => n * n )res10: IndexedSeq[Int] = Vector(1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100)

One more example, this time with Doubles as elements and a named function as a parameter:

import scala.math.sqrtimport scala.math.sqrt
val data = Vector(100.0, 25.0, 12.3, 2, 1.21)data: Vector[Double] = Vector(100.0, 25.0, 12.3, 2.0, 1.21)
data.map(sqrt)res11: Vector[Double] = Vector(10.0, 5.0, 3.5071355833500366, 1.4142135623730951, 1.1)

mapping the square-root function to each element gives us a collection with all the roots.

Getting to know map

A+ presents the exercise submission form here.

Question 1

Suppose you have a variable buffer of type Buffer[Int] that refers to a “one-dimensional” buffer of numbers. Let’s also assume the buffer contains a minimum of one element.

What happens if you now evaluate buffer.map( x => Buffer(x, x + 1) )? Experiment in the REPL as needed.

You get a compile-time error (type mismatch).

You get a runtime error.

You get a new “one-dimensional” buffer. The expression’s value is a reference to that buffer.

You get a new “two-dimensional”. The expression’s value is a reference to that buffer.

The numbers stored in buffer change.

The “one-dimensional” buffer that buffer refers to transforms into a “two-dimensional” one.

map vs. transform

The transform method is a relative of map that is available only on mutable collections such as buffers (but not on, say, vectors). Whereas map returns a new collection, transform replaces each element of the original collection with another. transform therefore closely resembles the transformEachElement function you wrote in Chapter 6.1.

Incidentally, the transformColors method of Chapter 6.1 is also a close relative of map: it maps colors to other colors.

The flatMap method

Chapter 6.1 mentioned a method that “flattens” a collection of collections:

val nested = Vector(Vector(3, -10, -4), Vector(5, -10, 1), Vector(-1), Vector(4, 4))nested: Vector[Vector[Int]] = Vector(Vector(3, -10, -4), Vector(5, -10, 1), Vector(-1), Vector(4, 4))
nested.flattenres12: Vector[Int] = Vector(3, -10, -4, 5, -10, 1, -1, 4, 4)

It’s fairly common that we want to first map a collection to produce a nested collection, then flatten the result. Here’s a toy example:

val numbers = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 5, 4, 5, -20)
val experiment = numbers.map( n => Vector(-n.abs, 0, n.abs) )experiment: Vector[Vector[Int]] = Vector(Vector(-10, 0, 10), Vector(-5, 0, 5), Vector(-4, 0, 4), Vector(-5, 0, 5),
Vector(-20, 0, 20))
experiment.flattenres13: Vector[Int] = Vector(-10, 0, 10, -5, 0, 5, -4, 0, 4, -5, 0, 5, -20, 0, 20)

It’s possible to combine map and flatten into a single method call:

numbers.flatMap( n => Vector(-n.abs, 0, n.abs) )res14: Vector[Int] = Vector(-10, 0, 10, -5, 0, 5, -4, 0, 4, -5, 0, 5, -20, 0, 20)

That is, collection.flatMap(myFunc) does the same as collection.map(myFunc).flatten.

You may well be wondering whether combining map with flatten is so useful that it merits a separate flatMap method. Yes, it really is. You’ll see as your programming experience grows during the rest of O1 and later.

Example: users and addresses

For a somewhat more interesting example of map and flatMap, consider the following class.

class User(val id: String, val emailAddresses: Vector[String]) {
  override def toString = this.id + " <" + this.emailAddresses.mkString(",") + ">"
}

Let’s imagine we’re working on an application that stores User objects in a vector. In the example below, our vector contains just two users, but of course there could be many more.

val allUsers = Vector(
  new User("sophia", Vector("sophia.student@aalto.fi", "sophia.student@iki.fi", "sophia.student@gmail.com")),
  new User("megadestroyer", Vector("teemu.teekkari@aalto.fi", "teemuteekkari@gmail.com"))
)allUsers: Vector[User] =
Vector(sophia <sophia.student@aalto.fi,sophia.student@iki.fi,sophia.student@gmail.com>,
megadestroyer <teemu.teekkari@aalto.fi,teemuteekkari@gmail.com>)

How can we now get a list of all the ids of all the users? What about a list of all the email addresses of all the users?

Sure, we could write a loop, but the just-introduced methods get the job done with minimal effort.

The map method gives us each user’s identifier if we pass in a function that maps a user object to its id.

allUsers.map( _.id )res15: Vector[String] = Vector(sophia, megadestroyer)

We can also use map to access the email addresses. This gives us a nested collection (which, depending on our purposes, may or may not be convenient):

allUsers.map( _.emailAddresses )res16: Vector[Vector[String]] = Vector(Vector(sophia.student@aalto.fi, sophia.student@iki.fi, sophia.student@gmail.com),
Vector(teemu.teekkari@aalto.fi, teemuteekkari@gmail.com))

Assuming we want a single “flat” collection of all the emails, we can use flatMap instead:

allUsers.flatMap( _.emailAddresses )res17: Vector[String] = Vector(sophia.student@aalto.fi, sophia.student@iki.fi, sophia.student@gmail.com,
teemu.teekkari@aalto.fi, teemuteekkari@gmail.com)

The next programming assignment is not only about methods on collections, but it does provide opportunities to use them.

Assignment: Snake

Snake is a classic computer game that originates from the 1970s: the player controls a “snake” or “worm” that turns about on a two-dimensional field, looking to eat and grow. In the 1990s, Snake renewed its popularity as a mobile game, which has in turn recently attracted nostalgic attention. By the time you read this, the game may have already reverted to passé retro kitch.

A game of Snake with an overlying grid for illustrative purposes. The green square represents an item of food that the snake can eat next; the food is at location (8,6). The numbering starts at the top left-hand corner, which is (0,0); that space, like the other edge spaces, are only partially visible. The snake in this picture has four segments, which are located at (5,4), (4,4), (3,4), and (3,5).

Snake is also a classic as a programming exercise. Let us join the tradition.

Concepts in Snake

The key components of a game of Snake are the snake itself and the food that the snake seeks to swallow. At any given moment, there is a single item of food available for the snake, located somewhere on the playing field. When the snake eats the food — that is, when the snake’s head is about to hit it — the snake grows and a new item of food appears.

You can think of the playing field as a grid (see image). The food is located in a single space on the grid. The snake consists of segments (“pieces”), each of which takes up a space.

In the picture above, the snake had traveled upwards and then turned to the right. In this picture, the snake has moved a single additional step compared to the previous state. The snake’s head has moved a single step to the right and “dragged” the other three segments with it. The location (3,5), which previously contained the last segment, is now empty.

The only thing the player can do is press one of the arrow keys to make the snake turn in that direction. The snake can move only in the four main compass directions.

As time passes, the snake moves step by step: its first segment, or “head”, moves in the latest direction chosen by the player and the other segments follow (see the second image). However, if the head enters the food space, the snake eats the food and grows by a single segment: a new segment appears where the food was and all the other segments remain where they were.

The game is over when the snake’s head hits something other than food.

Classes in Snake

The project Snake contains a partial implementation for the game. The overall design of the program resembles that of FlappyBug: we have a SnakeGame class that represents the mutable state of a game and a SnakeApp object that starts a GUI for displaying the state and receiving commands from the player.

So, an instance of SnakeGame represents a single session of Snake. Calling that instance’s methods changes its state. The SnakeGame object tracks:

• the next item of food: where is it on the grid?
• the location of the snake: where on the grid are its segments?
• the direction of the (head of the) snake: which of the four compass directions has it been ordered to go?

Our class needs to manipulate locations on the grid as well as directions. For that, we have tools on hand in package o1:

The classes GridPos and CompassDir

Class GridPos represents coordinates on a grid. Each coordinate is an integer.

• This class resembles the Pos you know but is specifically designed for use with grids and provides some convenient methods to that end.
• We therefore distinguish between two things: which space something is located at (GridPos) and which spot within a particular image something should be drawn at (Pos).
  • The GridPos is part of the program domain’s internal logic (i.e., the rules of Snake). The Pos is a feature of the GUI.
  • This is similar to what we did in the Stars project, where we distinguished between a StarCoords on a map and a Pos within an image.

The class CompassDir represents compass directions such as north (up) and west (left):

• It’s well suited for representing the snake’s heading.
• It combines well with the methods on GridPos. For instance, we can ask a GridPos object which coordinates neighbor it in a particular direction.

Both classes are documented within the O1Library project.

Relationships between classes in and around the Snake project.

Task description

In SnakeGame.scala and SnakeApp.scala, find the locations where something is missing and implement the missing parts. We suggest that you proceed as follows.

Step 0 of 4: preparations

Run the given program. You should see a playing field with a food item and a single-segment snakeling. (There is no visible grid like in the illustrations above; that’s intentional.) The snake doesn’t move yet.

Study class SnakeGame and its companion object. Observe that there are parts missing. Note how the given code uses the classes GridPos and CompassDir. In the Scaladocs for those other classes, read at least the introductions at the top; there’s no need to wade through all the methods. (The Snake project itself has no Scaladocs. All the information you need is in this chapter and in the Scala code.)

You may want to take a look at SnakeApp, too.

As the clock ticks, the GUI calls the advance method of the appropriate SnakeGame object. advance is supposed to move the snake. The given version doesn’t do anything, however.

Step 1 of 5: a mobile snake

For now, write a partial implementation for advance: make it move the snake’s head to the next space. Don’t worry about growing the snake yet.

Hints:

• The segments variable refers to a single-element vector that contains the location of the (head of the) snake. This is a var: replace its value with the neighboring location towards the current heading.
• There is a convenient method in GridPos for that.

Run the modified program. See the single segment slither.

The game ends when the snake hits an edge. You control the snake with the arrow keys (or WASD). The snake ignores the food.

Step 2 of 5: snake snacks

Develop advance further so that it places the food in a new random location as part of the movement that puts the snake’s only segment in the food space.

You can do that by updating the value of the nextFood variable. Use the given method randomLocationOnGrid to pick a new location.

Try running your program. Food gets eaten, but the snake doesn’t grow.

There’s a GameSpeed constant in SnakeApp. You can adjust it to your liking. You might want to slow down the game while testing, for instance.

Step 3 of 5: a growing snake

Finish up advance: 1) when the head is just about to hit the food, grow the snake, and 2) when the snake doesn’t eat, move each segment rather than just the head. That is, each time advance is called, it either grows or moves the snake but not both.

Now it’s no longer enough to replace the value of segments with a new single-element vector. Remove that line and write some new code.

Here are some hints:

• Replace the value of segments with a new vector that contains all the snake’s locations after the move. There should be either exactly as many segments as before, or one more.
• When the snake’s head is about to hit food, grow the snake from the front: all the other segments stay where they are and a new head segment appears at the food’s location. (The frontmost segment becomes the second-from-front.)
• You can use the tools from 4.2 to form the new vector. In particular, you may want to use the +: operator, which “adds” an element to the front like this:
  • newFirstElement +: oldVector
  • The segments are identical. You don’t have to move each segment separately. When the snake moves, you can leave the middle segments where they are: taking care of the first and last segments is enough for the appearance of movement.
• You may choose to reveal the additional hints below.
• Try running your program after you complete this step. The snake still doesn’t seem to grow. In fact, it does grow, but you don’t see it because the GUI draws only the head.

A hint about the +: operator

Show the hintHide the hint

First, here’s an example repeated from Chapter 4.2:

val firstStrings = Vector("first", "second")firstStrings: Vector[String] = Vector(first, second)
val bigger = "actually first" +: firstStringsbigger: Vector[String] = Vector(actually first, first, second)

Note that the variable firstStrings continues to refer to the original, unchanged vector. If you need a variable to refer to different vectors at different times, reassign to a var:

var words = Vector("first", "second")words: Vector[String] = Vector(first, second)
words = "new first" +: wordswords: Vector[String] = Vector(new first, first, second)

Another hint about vector methods

Show the hintHide the hint

When the snake advances without eating, you needs to construct a vector that contains the head’s new location followed by all the snake’s earlier locations except the last.

The REPL session below demonstrates the methods take, dropRight, and init. Take your pick and apply it to Snake.

val numbers = Vector(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70)numbers: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70)
numbers.take(3)res18: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 20, 30)
numbers.dropRight(3)res19: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 20, 30, 40)
numbers.initres20: Vector[Int] = Vector(10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60)

Step 4 of 5: sorting out the graphics

Turn to the SnakeApp program and the makePic method defined there. Observe:

• The method places only a single copy of SegmentPic (reddish picture of a snake segment) against the background.
• makePic uses an auxiliary function toPixelPos, which is defined in the same file. That function takes in a GridPos and determines where in the GUI image that space should be drawn.
• makePic also uses a placeCopies method from class Pic. As its first parameter, that method takes a picture. As its second parameter, it takes a vector of Pos objects. That method works just like the familiar place method, except that it places multiple copies of the same image. Which doesn’t help much yet, since the given code passes in only a single-element vector.

Edit makePic so that it draws all the segments as identical round shapes. Here’s how:

Additional hint

ShowHide

You have a collection of GridPoses. An easy way to get a collection with the corresponding Poses is to call map.

• Use toPixelPos to determine each segment’s position within the image. You don’t need a loop. Use one of the collection methods from this chapter.
• Call placeCopies, passing in a vector that contains a Pos for each segment.

The snake grows!

Step 5 of 5: collisions

Additional hint

ShowHide

The snake has a head and a tail. Your method should determine whether the head’s location is among the tail’s locations — that is, whether the tail contains the head. As noted, the tools for doing just that are in Chapter 4.2.

It is ordained by the tradition of snake gaming that snakes die if they collide with their own body. Attend to this in class SnakeGame: the isOver method should indicate that the game is over not only when the snake hits a wall but also if its head shares a location with any of the other segments.

You can again turn to Chapter 4.2 for tooling.

A special case

What should happen when a two-segment snake turns 180 degrees? Does its head segment collide with the single tail segment or not? You choose. The automatic tests for this assignment don’t test that case.

Submission form

A+ presents the exercise submission form here.

Higher-order methods and Scala syntax

Reading Scala programs outside O1, you’ll fairly soon run into programs that use the methods from this chapter in a different-looking way than we have. This command, for example:

myNumbers.filter( _ > 0 ).map( n => n * n ).count( _ % 2 == 0 )

can also be written as:

myNumbers filter { _ > 0 } map { n => n * n } count { _ % 2 == 0 }

Scala’s syntax is flexible and people use the language in different ways. The latter notation is made possible by two language features:

• You can use operator notation instead of dot notation to call a method. Some Scala programmers tend to do this whenever they call an effect-free higher-order method that takes a single parameter.
• When calling a method that takes a single parameter, you can use curly brackets instead of round brackets. Some Scala programmers tend to do this when they pass a function literal as a parameter to a method.

Even if you don’t use these alternative notations, it’s good to know about them since some others do use them.

As noted in Chapter 5.2, we largely avoid operator notation in O1.

Summary of Key Points

• The collection classes of the Scala API define a whole bunch of higher-order methods that operate on the elements of collections.
  • Methods in common use include foreach, exists, forall, find, filter, map, and flatMap. You’ll see more later.
  • These methods provide generic solutions to common problems and are often a convenient alternative to loops.
  • Processing collections in this manner is especially common in so-called functional programming, which Scala encourages.
• Links to the glossary: higher-order function; collection; level of abstraction.

Why This Chapter Matters

We’ll make frequent use of the methods introduced above. They will serve you well in upcoming programming assignments.

You’ll need to read a lot of given code that uses these methods.

You may initially struggle to recall each method. Then again, you don’t need to. You can return to this chapter for reference, or use our Scala Reference.

The important thing for now is to bear in mind the general idea: there is a wide selection of convenient higher-order methods on offer.

Feedback

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Credits

Thousands of students have given feedback that has contributed to this ebook’s design. Thank you!

Weeks 1 to 13 of the ebook, including the assignments and weekly bulletins, have been written in Finnish and translated into English by Juha Sorva.

Weeks 14 to 20 are by Otto Seppälä. That part of the ebook isn’t available during the fall term, but we’ll publish it when it’s time.

The appendices (glossary, Scala reference, FAQ, etc.) are by Juha Sorva unless otherwise specified on the page.

The automatic assessment of the assignments has been developed by: (in alphabetical order) Riku Autio, Nikolas Drosdek, Joonatan Honkamaa, Jaakko Kantojärvi, Niklas Kröger, Teemu Lehtinen, Strasdosky Otewa, Timi Seppälä, Teemu Sirkiä, and Aleksi Vartiainen.

The illustrations at the top of each chapter, and the similar drawings elsewhere in the ebook, are the work of Christina Lassheikki.

The animations that detail the execution Scala programs have been designed by Juha Sorva and Teemu Sirkiä. Teemu Sirkiä and Riku Autio have done the technical implementation, relying on Teemu’s Jsvee and Kelmu toolkits.

The other diagrams and interactive presentations in the ebook are by Juha Sorva.

The O1Library software has been developed by Aleksi Lukkarinen and Juha Sorva. Several of its key components are built upon Aleksi’s SMCL library.

The pedagogy behind O1Library’s tools for simple graphical programming (such as Pic) is inspired by the textbooks How to Design Programs by Flatt, Felleisen, Findler, and Krishnamurthi and Picturing Programs by Stephen Bloch.

The course platform A+ has been created by Aalto’s LeTech research group and is largely developed by students. The current lead developer is Jaakko Kantojärvi; many other students of computer science and information networks are also active on the project.

For O1’s current teaching staff, please see Chapter 1.1.

Additional credits appear at the ends of some chapters.

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