Instantiate in Java with the Scala’s Way

Case classes in Scala facilitate the instantiation by removing the use of the keyword new. It isn’t a big invention, but it helps to have a source code more readable. Especially when you imbricate these instantiations one in another. The force of Scala’s case classes is to provide a way to practice symbolic computation — in my post named Playing with Scala’s pattern matching, read the section Advanced pattern matching: case class.

Suppose that you want to declare a type that represents a pair of elements. We don’t know the type of these elements and they may have different types. In Scala, you’ll write something like this:

case class Pair[T1, T2](first: T1, second: T2)

// usage: val myPair = Pair(1, 2)

The implementation in Java below is a (hugely) simplified equivalent to the implementation in Scala:

public class Pair<T1, T2> {
    private T1 first;
    private T2 second;

    public Pair(T1 first, T2 second) {
        this.first = first;
        this.second = second;
    }

    public static <T1, T2> Pair<T1, T2> Pair(T1 first, T2 second) {
        return new Pair(first, second);
    }
}

Here is an example where I design a binary tree structure with the help of the Java version of Pair. Notice that with this approach, I don’t have to use the diamond declaration in the instantiation (ie. Pair<Integer, Pair<String, ...>>). It’s automatically determined by the type inference algorithm.

Pair<Integer, Pair<String, Pair<Boolean, Object>>> tree
  = Pair(1,
      Pair("hello",
        Pair(true, new Object())));

Now, you can say it’s really helpful!

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