What are views for collections and when would you want to use them?

Question

In Scala, for many (all?) types of collections you can create views.

What exactly is a view and for which purposes are views useful?

Answer 1

Views are non-strict versions of collections. This means that the elements are calculated at access and not eagerly as in normal collections.

As an example take the following code:

val xs = List.tabulate(5)(_ + 1)
val ys = xs.view map { x => println(x); x * x }

Just this will not print anything but every access to the list will perform the calculation and print the value, i.e. every call to ys.head will result in 1 being printed. If you want to get a strict version of the collection again you can call force on it. In this case you will see all numbers printed out.

One use for views is when you need to traverse a collection of values which are expensive to compute and you only need one value at a time. Also views let you build lazy sequences by calling toStream on them that will also cache the evaluated elements.