For Comprehensions

In Scala, the concept of a "for loop" doesn't really exist. Instead, we get "for comprehensions," which cover for loops, foreach loops, and more as we will see. Suppose you have the following line of Scala:

for (i <- 0 until 10) yield i

It looks roughly like a for loop with some syntactic sugar. But as I mentioned, Scala doesn't have for loops, and this code actually gets translated by the compiler into

(0 until 10).map(i => i)

The until method is part of the RichInt class, and an implicit conversion from Int to RichInt is available by default in Scala. (0 until 10) produces a Range, and the result of the entire expression is an IndexedSeq[Int]. But what's so interesting about the fact that Scala translates for loops into map calls? It turns out that this translation is generic, i.e. not specific to a certain set of classes like collections. So we can write our own class that exposes a map method and leverage the syntactic sugar of for comprehensions. Here's an example based on a Sequence trait that represents an infinite sequence of integers:


A Sequence only knows how to do two things: get the element at some index and map to a new sequence using a function. We have two simple types of sequences, namely the ArithmeticSequence (whose name should be self-descriptive), and the MappedSequence that takes another sequence and applies a function to each element. The implementations of the two should be straightforward to understand. Now comes the interesting part: because we have implemented the map method, we can use the for comprehension syntax on our Sequence classes.


We start out with a simple ArithmeticSequence, but then we create a new sequence (using a for comprehension) in which every element is squared. And then we create a third sequence which replaces all of the odd elements of the second sequence with 0. All three of these are infinite sequences that we can access random elements of, as demonstrated in the final line.

What I've shown here is a primitive example of how for comprehensions can be leveraged by custom classes in Scala. This functionality was brought to my attention in the first week of the reactive programming class on Coursera, which is taught by some of the most knowledgeable Scala folks (including the designer of the language!). It turns out that the map method lets you do simple thing like what I did, but if you implement flatMap and filter, you can do arbitrarily complex for comprehensions with multiple variables and conditionals just like you would with collections. This is a good example of an aspect I like about Scala's philosophy, which is to generalize concepts as much as possible. While many languages treat for loops as their own special construct, Scala simply makes them syntactic sugar for a much richer class of functionality.