This question is related to ( Why is there no string interpolation in Scala? ), but deals more specifically with multi-line strings.
I've just about bought into Martin's suggestion for simple string placeholder where
msg = "Hello {name}!"
can be be represented without much difference in Scala today like this:
msg = "Hello"+name+"!"
However, I don't think that approach holds with multi-line strings. And, in some cases it may be encouraging other poor practices in favor of readability. Note that in the Scala Play ANORM database mapping how the framework tries to preserve readability in plain SQL (using placeholders), but at the expense of duplicating the {countryCode} variable name and in a non-type-safe way, see...
.on("countryCode" -> "FRA")
SQL(
"""
select * from Country c
join CountryLanguage l on l.CountryCode = c.Code
where c.code = {countryCode};
"""
).on("countryCode" -> "FRA")
Additionally, assuming no change in Scala to address this, what would be the implication of using inline XML? How would performance, memory, etc. with something like:
val countryCode = "FRA"
SQL(<c>
select * from Country c
join CountryLanguage l on l.CountryCode = c.Code
where c.code = {countryCode};
</c>.text)
A scala.xml.Elem would be constructed which had the string contents represented as an ArrayBuffer, chopped up for every { } substitution. I'm certainly no authority but I believe what would happen is that there's a little extra overhead in construction the object and then getting the children and concatenating them together at runtime but, at least in this example, as soon as it's passed to the SQL function which then extracts the string it wants (or perhaps this would be done with an implicit) the Elem object would be discarded so there'd be a little extra memory usage, but only briefly.
But in the bigger picture, I don't think it's performance that would hinder the adoption of this solution but I guess a lot of people would be uncomfortable abusing XML in this way by using a made-up tag. The problem would be with other users reading the code later trying to figure out the semantic meaning of the tag... only to find there isn't one.
The example you give is almost certainly not doing string concatenation, it's creating parameterized SQL statements (probably via JDBC's PreparedStatement).
Ironically, the lack of easy string concatenation is probably slightly encouraging best practices in this case (although I certainly wouldn't use that as an argument either way on the topic).
If you are coming to this question from the future, multi-line string interpolation is now a thing.
val when = "now"
println(s"""this is $when a thing.""")
// this is now a thing
Related
I have heard that it is a good practice in Scala to eliminate for loops and do things "the Scala way". I even found a Scala style checker at http://www.scalastyle.org. Are for loops a no-no in Scala? In a course at https://www.udemy.com/course/apache-spark-with-scala-hands-on-with-big-data/learn/lecture/5363798#overview I found this example, which makes me thing that for looks are okay to use, but using the Scala format and syntax of course, in a single line and not like the traditional Java for looks in multiple lines of code. See this example I found from that Udemy course:
val shipList = List("Enterprise", "Defiant", "Voyager", "Deep Space Nine")
for (ship <- shipList) {println(ship)}
That for loop prints this result, as expected:
Enterprise Defiant Voyager Deep Space Nine
I was wondering if using for as in the example above is acceptable Scala style code, or it if is a no-no and why. Thank you!
There is no problem in this for loop, but you can use functions form List object for your work in more functional way.
e.g. instead of using
val shipList = List("Enterprise", "Defiant", "Voyager", "Deep Space Nine")
for (ship <- shipList) {println(ship)}
You can use
val shipList = List("Enterprise", "Defiant", "Voyager", "Deep Space Nine")
shipList.foreach(element => println(element) )
or
shipList.foreach(println)
You can use for loops in Scala, there is no problem with that. But the difference is that this for-loop is not an expression and does not return a value, so you need to use a variable in order to return any value. Scala gives preference to work with immutable types.
In your example you print messages in the console, you need to perform a "side effect" to extract the value breaking the referencial transparency, I mean, you depend on the IO operation to extract a value, or you have mutate a variable which is in the scope which maybe is being accessed by another thread or another concurrent task thereby there is no guarantee that the value that you collect wont be what you are expecting. Obviously, all these hypothesis are related to concurrent/parallel programming and there is where Scala and the immutable style help.
To show the elements of a collection you can use a for loop, but if you want to count the total number of chars in Scala you do that using a expression like:
val chars = shipList.foldLeft(0)((a, b) => a + b.length)
To sum up, most of the times the Scala code that you will read uses immutable style of programming although not always because Scala supports the other way of coding too, but it is weird to find something using a classic Java OOP style, mutating object instances and using getters and setters.
Consider a repository/DAO method like this, which works great:
def countReports(customerId: Long, createdSince: ZonedDateTime) =
DB.withConnection {
implicit c =>
SQL"""SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM report
WHERE customer_id = $customerId
AND created >= $createdSince
""".as(scalar[Int].single)
}
But what if the method is defined with optional parameters:
def countReports(customerId: Option[Long], createdSince: Option[ZonedDateTime])
Point being, if either optional argument is present, use it in filtering the results (as shown above), and otherwise (in case it is None) simply leave out the corresponding WHERE condition.
What's the simplest way to write this method with optional WHERE conditions? As Anorm newbie I was struggling to find an example of this, but I suppose there must be some sensible way to do it (that is, without duplicating the SQL for each combination of present/missing arguments).
Note that the java.time.ZonedDateTime instance maps perfectly and automatically into Postgres timestamptz when used inside the Anorm SQL call. (Trying to extract the WHERE condition as a string, outside SQL, created with normal string interpolation did not work; toString produces a representation not understood by the database.)
Play 2.4.4
One approach is to set up filter clauses such as
val customerClause =
if (customerId.isEmpty) ""
else " and customer_id={customerId}"
then substitute these into you SQL:
SQL(s"""
select count(*)
from report
where true
$customerClause
$createdClause
""")
.on('customerId -> customerId,
'createdSince -> createdSince)
.as(scalar[Int].singleOpt).getOrElse(0)
Using {variable} as opposed to $variable is I think preferable as it reduces the risk of SQL injection attacks where someone potentially calls your method with a malicious string. Anorm doesn't mind if you have additional symbols that aren't referenced in the SQL (i.e. if a clause string is empty). Lastly, depending on the database(?), a count might return no rows, so I use singleOpt rather than single.
I'm curious as to what other answers you receive.
Edit: Anorm interpolation (i.e. SQL"...", an interpolation implementation beyond Scala's s"...", f"..." and raw"...") was introduced to allow the use $variable as equivalent to {variable} with .on. And from Play 2.4, Scala and Anorm interpolation can be mixed using $ for Anorm (SQL parameter/variable) and #$ for Scala (plain string). And indeed this works well, as long as the Scala interpolated string does not contains references to an SQL parameter. The only way, in 2.4.4, I could find to use a variable in an Scala interpolated string when using Anorm interpolation, was:
val limitClause = if (nameFilter="") "" else s"where name>'$nameFilter'"
SQL"select * from tab #$limitClause order by name"
But this is vulnerable to SQL injection (e.g. a string like it's will cause a runtime syntax exception). So, in the case of variables inside interpolated strings, it seems it is necessary to use the "traditional" .on approach with only Scala interpolation:
val limitClause = if (nameFilter="") "" else "where name>{nameFilter}"
SQL(s"select * from tab $limitClause order by name").on('limitClause -> limitClause)
Perhaps in the future Anorm interpolation could be extended to parse the interpolated string for variables?
Edit2: I'm finding there are some tables where the number of attributes that might or might not be included in the query changes from time to time. For these cases I'm defining a context class, e.g. CustomerContext. In this case class there are lazy vals for the different clauses that affect the sql. Callers of the sql method must supply a CustomerContext, and the sql will then have inclusions such as ${context.createdClause} and so on. This helps give a consistency, as I end up using the context in other places (such as total record count for paging, etc.).
Finally got this simpler approach posted by Joel Arnold to work in my example case, also with ZonedDateTime!
def countReports(customerId: Option[Long], createdSince: Option[ZonedDateTime]) =
DB.withConnection {
implicit c =>
SQL( """
SELECT count(*) FROM report
WHERE ({customerId} is null or customer_id = {customerId})
AND ({created}::timestamptz is null or created >= {created})
""")
.on('customerId -> customerId, 'created -> createdSince)
.as(scalar[Int].singleOpt).getOrElse(0)
}
The tricky part is having to use {created}::timestamptz in the null check. As Joel commented, this is needed to work around a PostgreSQL driver issue.
Apparently the cast is needed only for timestamp types, and the simpler way ({customerId} is null) works with everything else. Also, comment if you know whether other databases require something like this, or if this is a Postgres-only peculiarity.
(While wwkudu's approach also works fine, this definitely is cleaner, as you can see comparing them side to side in a full example.)
I am new to Scala and heard a lot that everything is an object in Scala. What I don't get is what's the advantage of "everything's an object"? What are things that I cannot do if everything is not an object? Examples are welcome. Thanks
The advantage of having "everything" be an object is that you have far fewer cases where abstraction breaks.
For example, methods are not objects in Java. So if I have two strings, I can
String s1 = "one";
String s2 = "two";
static String caps(String s) { return s.toUpperCase(); }
caps(s1); // Works
caps(s2); // Also works
So we have abstracted away string identity in our operation of making something upper case. But what if we want to abstract away the identity of the operation--that is, we do something to a String that gives back another String but we want to abstract away what the details are? Now we're stuck, because methods aren't objects in Java.
In Scala, methods can be converted to functions, which are objects. For instance:
def stringop(s: String, f: String => String) = if (s.length > 0) f(s) else s
stringop(s1, _.toUpperCase)
stringop(s2, _.toLowerCase)
Now we have abstracted the idea of performing some string transformation on nonempty strings.
And we can make lists of the operations and such and pass them around, if that's what we need to do.
There are other less essential cases (object vs. class, primitive vs. not, value classes, etc.), but the big one is collapsing the distinction between method and object so that passing around and abstracting over functionality is just as easy as passing around and abstracting over data.
The advantage is that you don't have different operators that follow different rules within your language. For example, in Java to perform operations involving objects, you use the dot name technique of calling the code (static objects still use the dot name technique, but sometimes the this object or the static object is inferred) while built-in items (not objects) use a different method, that of built-in operator manipulation.
Number one = Integer.valueOf(1);
Number two = Integer.valueOf(2);
Number three = one.plus(two); // if only such methods existed.
int one = 1;
int two = 2;
int three = one + two;
the main differences is that the dot name technique is subject to polymorphisim, operator overloading, method hiding, and all the good stuff that you can do with Java objects. The + technique is predefined and completely not flexible.
Scala circumvents the inflexibility of the + method by basically handling it as a dot name operator, and defining a strong one-to-one mapping of such operators to object methods. Hence, in Scala everything is an object means that everything is an object, so the operation
5 + 7
results in two objects being created (a 5 object and a 7 object) the plus method of the 5 object being called with the parameter 7 (if my scala memory serves me correctly) and a "12" object being returned as the value of the 5 + 7 operation.
This everything is an object has a lot of benefits in a functional programming environment, for example, blocks of code now are object too, making it possible to pass back and forth blocks of code (without names) as parameters, yet still be bound to strict type checking (the block of code only returns Long or a subclass of String or whatever).
When it boils down to it, it makes some kinds of solutions very easy to implement, and often the inefficiencies are mitigated by the lack of need to handle "move into primitives, manipulate, move out of primitives" marshalling code.
One specific advantage that comes to my mind (since you asked for examples) is what in Java are primitive types (int, boolean ...) , in Scala are objects that you can add functionality to with implicit conversions. For example, if you want to add a toRoman method to ints, you could write an implicit class like:
implicit class RomanInt(i:Int){
def toRoman = //some algorithm to convert i to a Roman representation
}
Then, you could call this method from any Int literal like :
val romanFive = 5.toRoman // V
This way you can 'pimp' basic types to adapt them to your needs
In addition to the points made by others, I always emphasize that the uniform treatment of all values in Scala is in part an illusion. For the most part it is a very welcome illusion. And Scala is very smart to use real JVM primitives as much as possible and to perform automatic transformations (usually referred to as boxing and unboxing) only as much as necessary.
However, if the dynamic pattern of application of automatic boxing and unboxing is very high, there can be undesirable costs (both memory and CPU) associated with it. This can be partially mitigated with the use of specialization, which creates special versions of generic classes when particular type parameters are of (programmer-specified) primitive types. This avoids boxing and unboxing but comes at the cost of more .class files in your running application.
Not everything is an object in Scala, though more things are objects in Scala than their analogues in Java.
The advantage of objects is that they're bags of state which also have some behavior coupled with them. With the addition of polymorphism, objects give you ways of changing the implicit behavior and state. Enough with the poetry, let's go into some examples.
The if statement is not an object, in either scala or java. If it were, you could be able to subclass it, inject another dependency in its place, and use it to do stuff like logging to a file any time your code makes use of the if statement. Wouldn't that be magical? It would in some cases help you debug stuff, and in other cases it would make your hairs grow white before you found a bug caused by someone overwriting the behavior of if.
Visiting an objectless, statementful world: Imaging your favorite OOP programming language. Think of the standard library it provides. There's plenty of classes there, right? They offer ways for customization, right? They take parameters that are other objects, they create other objects. You can customize all of these. You have polymorphism. Now imagine that all the standard library was simply keywords. You wouldn't be able to customize nearly as much, because you can't overwrite keywords. You'd be stuck with whatever cases the language designers decided to implement, and you'd be helpless in customizing anything there. Such languages exist, you know them well, they're the sequel-like languages. You can barely create functions there, but in order to customize the behavior of the SELECT statement, new versions of the language had to appear which included the features most desired. This would be an extreme world, where you'd only be able to program by asking the language designers for new features (which you might not get, because someone else more important would require some feature incompatible with what you want)
In conclusion, NOT everything is an object in scala: Classes, expressions, keywords and packages surely aren't. More things however are, like functions.
What's IMHO a nice rule of thumb is that more objects equals more flexibility
P.S. in Python for example, even more things are objects (like the classes themselves, the analogous concept for packages (that is python modules and packages). You'd see how there, black magic is easier to do, and that brings both good and bad consequences.
In Java, it's a common best practice to do string concatenation with StringBuilder due to the poor performance of appending strings using the + operator. Is the same practice recommended for Scala or has the language improved on how java performs its string concatenation?
Scala uses Java strings (java.lang.String), so its string concatenation is the same as Java's: the same thing is taking place in both. (The runtime is the same, after all.) There is a special StringBuilder class in Scala, that "provides an API compatible with java.lang.StringBuilder"; see http://www.scala-lang.org/api/2.7.5/scala/StringBuilder.html.
But in terms of "best practices", I think most people would generally consider it better to write simple, clear code than maximally efficient code, except when there's an actual performance problem or a good reason to expect one. The + operator doesn't really have "poor performance", it's just that s += "foo" is equivalent to s = s + "foo" (i.e. it creates a new String object), which means that, if you're doing a lot of concatenations to (what looks like) "a single string", you can avoid creating unnecessary objects — and repeatedly recopying earlier portions from one string to another — by using a StringBuilder instead of a String. Usually the difference is not important. (Of course, "simple, clear code" is slightly contradictory: using += is simpler, using StringBuilder is clearer. But still, the decision should usually be based on code-writing considerations rather than minor performance considerations.)
Scalas String concatenation works the same way as Javas does.
val x = 5
"a"+"b"+x+"c"
is translated to
new StringBuilder()).append("ab").append(BoxesRunTime.boxToInteger(x)).append("c").toString()
StringBuilder is scala.collection.mutable.StringBuilder. That's the reason why the value appended to the StringBuilder is boxed by the compiler.
You can check the behavior by decompile the bytecode with javap.
I want to add: if you have a sequence of strings, then there is already a method to create a new string out of them (all items, concatenated). It's called mkString.
Example: (http://ideone.com/QJhkAG)
val example = Seq("11111", "2222", "333", "444444")
val result = example.mkString
println(result) // prints "111112222333444444"
Scala uses java.lang.String as the type for strings, so it is subject to the same characteristics.
This may seem really obvious to the FP cognoscenti here, but what is point free style in Scala good for? What would really sell me on the topic is an illustration that shows how point free style is significantly better in some dimension (e.g. performance, elegance, extensibility, maintainability) than code solving the same problem in non-point free style.
Quite simply, it's about being able to avoid specifying a name where none is needed, consider a trivial example:
List("a","b","c") foreach println
In this case, foreach is looking to accept String => Unit, a function that accepts a String and returns Unit (essentially, that there's no usable return and it works purely through side effect)
There's no need to bind a name here to each String instance that's passed to println. Arguably, it just makes the code more verbose to do so:
List("a","b","c") foreach {println(_)}
Or even
List("a","b","c") foreach {s => println(s)}
Personally, when I see code that isn't written in point-free style, I take it as an indicator that the bound name may be used twice, or that it has some significance in documenting the code. Likewise, I see point-free style as a sign that I can reason about the code more simply.
One appeal of point-free style in general is that without a bunch of "points" (values as opposed to functions) floating around, which must be repeated in several places to thread them through the computation, there are fewer opportunities to make a mistake, e.g. when typing a variable's name.
However, the advantages of point-free are quickly counterbalanced in Scala by its meagre ability to infer types, a fact which is exacerbated by point-free code because "points" serve as clues to the type inferencer. In Haskell, with its almost-complete type inferencing, this is usually not an issue.
I see no other advantage than "elegance": It's a little bit shorter, and may be more readable. It allows to reason about functions as entities, without going mentally a "level deeper" to function application, but of course you need getting used to it first.
I don't know any example where performance improves by using it (maybe it gets worse in cases where you end up with a function when a method would be sufficient).
Scala's point-free syntax is part of the magic Scala operators-which-are-really-functions. Even the most basic operators are functions:
For example:
val x = 1
val y = x + 1
...is the same as...
val x = 1
val y = x.+(1)
...but of course, the point-free style reads more naturally (the plus appears to be an operator).