A Tour of Scala: Generic Classes

Like in Java 5 (aka. JDK 1.5), Scala has built-in support for classes parameterized with types. Such generic classes are particularly useful for the development of collection classes.

Here is an example which demonstrates this:

class Stack[T] {
  var elems: List[T] = Nil
  def push(x: T) { elems = x :: elems }
  def top: T = elems.head
  def pop() { elems = elems.tail }
}

Class Stack models imperative (mutable) stacks of an arbitrary element type T. The use of type parameters allows to check that only legal elements (that are of type T) are pushed onto the stack. Similarly, with type parameters we can express that method top will only yield elements of the given type.

Here are some usage examples:

object GenericsTest extends Application {
  val stack = new Stack[Int]
  stack.push(1)
  stack.push('a')
  println(stack.top)
  stack.pop()
  println(stack.top)
}

The output of this program will be:

97
1

Note that subtyping of generic types is invariant. This means that if we have a stack of characters of typeStack[Char] then it cannot be used as an integer stack of type Stack[Int]. This would be unsound because it would enable us to enter true integers into the character stack. To conclude, Stack[T] is only a subtype of Stack[S] iff S = T. Since this can be quite restrictive, Scala offers a type parameter annotation mechanism to control the subtyping behavior of generic types.