Pattern matching and infinite streams

Question

So, I\'m working to teach myself Scala, and one of the things I\'ve been playing with is the Stream class. I tried to use a naïve translation of the classic Haskell

Answer 1

Note that you can do what you want by defining a better pattern matcher for Stream:

Here's a bit I just pulled together in a Scala Worksheet:

object HammingTest {
  // A convenience object for stream pattern matching
  object #:: {
    class TailWrapper[+A](s: Stream[A]) {
      def unwrap = s.tail
    }
    object TailWrapper {
      implicit def unwrap[A](wrapped: TailWrapper[A]) = wrapped.unwrap
    }
    def unapply[A](s: Stream[A]): Option[(A, TailWrapper[A])] = {
      if (s.isEmpty) None
      else {
        Some(s.head, new TailWrapper(s))
      }
    }
  }

  def merge(a: Stream[BigInt], b: Stream[BigInt]): Stream[BigInt] =
    (a, b) match {
      case (x #:: xs, y #:: ys) =>
        if (x < y) x #:: merge(xs, b)
        else if (y < x) y #:: merge(a, ys)
        else x #:: merge(xs, ys)
    }                                             //> merge: (a: Stream[BigInt], b: Stream[BigInt])Stream[BigInt]

  lazy val numbers: Stream[BigInt] =
    1 #:: merge(numbers map { _ * 2 }, merge(numbers map { _ * 3 }, numbers map { _ * 5 }))
                                                  //> numbers  : Stream[BigInt] = 
  numbers.take(10).toList                         //> res0: List[BigInt] = List(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12)
}

Now you just need to make sure that Scala finds your object #:: instead of the one in Stream.class whenever it's doing pattern matching. To facilitate that, it might be best to use a different name like #>: or ##:: and then just remember to always use that name when pattern matching.

If you ever need to match the empty stream, use case Stream.Empty. Using case Stream() will attempt to evaluate your entire stream there in the pattern match, which will lead to sadness.