Learning Functional Data Structures and Algorithms

Laziness and deferred execution

To deal with excessive copying, we can resort to a feature called deferred processing, also known as, lazy collections. A collection is lazy when all of its elements are not realized at the time of creation. Instead, elements are computed on demand.

Let's write a program to generate numbers from 1 to 100. We wish to check which numbers are evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Let's generate a lazy collection of the input numbers:

scala> val list = (1 to 100).toList.view 
list: scala.collection.SeqView[Int,List[Int]] = SeqView(...) 

We convert an existing Scala collection into a lazy one by calling the view function. Note that the list elements are not printed out, as these are not yet computed.

The following snippet shows ...