Is there a safe way in Scala to transpose a List of unequal-length Lists?

Question

Given the following List:

val l = List(List(1, 2, 3), List(4, 5), List(6, 7, 8))

If I try to transpose it, Scala will throw the following e

Answer 1

I don't know of (and can't imagine - isn't this is a bit odd?! [see discussion in comments]) a library function, but I can polish the code a little:

scala> def transpose(x: List[List[Int]]): List[List[Int]] = {
     |   val b = new ListBuffer[List[Int]]
     |   var y = x filter (!_.isEmpty)
     |   while (!y.isEmpty) {
     |     b += y map (_.head)
     |     y = y map (_.tail) filter (!_.isEmpty)
     |   }
     |   b.toList
     | }