Scala Tutorial - Scala Lists

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In Scala Lists, all elements have the same type like arrays, but unlike arrays, elements of a list cannot by changed by assignment.

The list that has elements of type T is written as List[T].

There are two ways to create a list:

• create the list in the similar manner you create arrays
• use :: cons operator.

Example

First we will show the more traditional approach. The following code shows how you can create an empty list.

val empty: List[Nothing] = List() 

Note that the type of the list is Nothing.

We can create the list of books as shown in the following code:

val books: List[String] = List("Scala", "Groovy", "Java") 

Both these lists can be defined using a tail Nil and ::.

Nil also represents the empty list.

An empty list can be defined using Nil.

val empty = Nil 

The books list can be defined using a tail Nil and :: as shown in the following code.

val books = "Scala" :: ("Groovy" :: ("Java" :: Nil)) 

The operations on the lists can be expressed in terms of head and tail methods, where head returns the first element of a list and tail returns a list consisting of all elements except the first element.

object Main {
  def main(args: Array[String]) {
    val books = "Scala" :: ("Groovy" :: ("Java" :: Nil)) 
    println(books.head )
    println(books.tail )
  }
}

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