Higher Order Function

Remarks#

Scala goes to great lengths to treat methods and functions as syntactically identical. But under the hood, they are distinct concepts.

A method is executable code, and has no value representation.

A function is an actual object instance of type Function1 (or a similar type of another arity). Its code is contained in its apply method. Effectively, it simply acts as a value that can be passed around.

Incidentally, the ability to treat functions as values is exactly what is meant by a language having support for higher-order functions. Function instances are Scala’s approach to implementing this feature.

An actual higher-order function is a function that either takes a function value as an argument or returns a function value. But in Scala, as all operations are methods, it’s more general to think of methods that receive or return function parameters. So map, as defined on Seq might be thought of as a “higher-order function” due to its parameter being a function, but it is not literally a function; it is a method.

Using methods as function values

The Scala compiler will automatically convert methods into function values for the purpose of passing them into higher-order functions.

object MyObject {
  def mapMethod(input: Int): String = {
    int.toString
  }
}

Seq(1, 2, 3).map(MyObject.mapMethod) // Seq("1", "2", "3")

In the example above, MyObject.mapMethod is not a function call, but instead is passed to map as a value. Indeed, map requires a function value passed to it, as can be seen in it’s signature. The signature for the map of a List[A] (a list of objects of type A) is:

def map[B](f: (A) ⇒ B): List[B]

The f: (A) => B part indicates that the parameter to this method call is some function that takes an object of type A and returns an object of type B. A and B are arbitrarily defined. Returning to the first example, we can see that mapMethod takes an Int (which corresponds to A) and returns a String (which corresponds to B). Thus mapMethod is a valid function value to pass to map. We could rewrite the same code like this:

Seq(1, 2, 3).map(x:Int => int.toString)

This inlines the function value, which may add clarity for simple functions.

High Order Functions(Function as Parameter)

A higher-order function, as opposed to a first-order function, can have one of three forms:

• One or more of its parameters is a function, and it returns some value.

• It returns a function, but none of its parameters is a function.

• Both of the above: One or more of its parameters is a function, and it returns a function.

  object HOF {
      def main(args: Array[String]) {
      val list = List(("Srini","E"),("Subash","R"),("Ranjith","RK"),("Vicky","s"),("Sudhar","s"))
      //HOF
       val fullNameList= list.map(n => getFullName(n._1, n._2))
  
       }
  
      def getFullName(firstName: String, lastName: String): String = firstName + "." + lastName
      }

Here the map function takes a getFullName(n._1,n._2) function as a parameter. This is called HOF (Higher order function).

Arguments lazy evaluation

Scala supports lazy evaluation for function arguments using notation: def func(arg: => String). Such function argument might take regular String object or a higher order function with String return type. In second case, function argument would be evaluated on value access.

Please see the example:

def calculateData: String = {
  print("Calculating expensive data! ")
  "some expensive data"
}

def dumbMediator(preconditions: Boolean, data: String): Option[String] = {
  print("Applying mediator")
  preconditions match {
    case true => Some(data)
    case false => None
  }
}

def smartMediator(preconditions: Boolean, data: => String): Option[String] = {
  print("Applying mediator")
  preconditions match {
    case true => Some(data)
    case false => None
  }
}

smartMediator(preconditions = false, calculateData)

dumbMediator(preconditions = false, calculateData)

smartMediator call would return None value and print message "Applying mediator".

dumbMediator call would return None value and print message "Calculating expensive data! Applying mediator".

Lazy evaluation might be extremely useful when you want to optimize an overhead of expensive arguments calculation.