Functional Programming in Scala – Week 4

Week 4 continued to delve into polymorphism with a focus on Types and Pattern Matching. Generalizing functions to accept multiple parameter types is a clear highlight of Scala.

Pattern matching was a topic of week 4 that was used in every subsequent week. Case statement with pattern matching appears to be another staple of Scala.

Number(1) match {
  case Number(n) => n
  case Sum(e1, e2) => eval(e1) + eval(e2)
} + eval(Number(2))

Week 4 lectures

Week 4’s assignment of implementing the Huffman coding compression algorithm was a good practical example of Scala’s power. Note my source has a number of errors in it.

Week 4 Assignment source