The List Class

The List class is a linear, immutable sequence. All this means is that it’s a linked-list that you can’t modify. Any time you want to add or remove List elements, you create a new List from an existing List.

Creating Lists

This is how you create an initial List:

val ints = List(1, 2, 3)
val names = List("Joel", "Chris", "Ed")

You can also declare the List’s type, if you prefer, though it generally isn’t necessary:

val ints: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3)
val names: List[String] = List("Joel", "Chris", "Ed")

Adding elements to a List

Because List is immutable, you can’t add new elements to it. Instead you create a new list by prepending or appending elements to an existing List. For instance, given this List:

val a = List(1,2,3)

You prepend elements to a List like this:

val b = 0 +: a

and this:

val b = List(-1, 0) ++: a

The REPL shows how this works:

scala> val b = 0 +: a
b: List[Int] = List(0, 1, 2, 3)

scala> val b = List(-1, 0) ++: a
b: List[Int] = List(-1, 0, 1, 2, 3)

You can also append elements to a List, but because List is a singly-linked list, you should really only prepend elements to it; appending elements to it is a relatively slow operation, especially when you work with large sequences.

Tip: If you want to prepend and append elements to an immutable sequence, use Vector instead.

Because List is a linked-list class, you shouldn’t try to access the elements of large lists by their index value. For instance, if you have a List with one million elements in it, accessing an element like myList(999999) will take a long time. If you want to access elements like this, use a Vector or ArrayBuffer instead.

How to remember the method names

These days, IDEs help us out tremendously, but one way to remember those method names is to think that the : character represents the side that the sequence is on, so when you use +: you know that the list needs to be on the right, like this:

0 +: a

Similarly, when you use :+ you know the list needs to be on the left:

a :+ 4

There are more technical ways to think about this, this can be a simple way to remember the method names.

One good thing about these method names: they’re consistent. The same method names are used with other immutable sequence classes, such as Seq and Vector.

How to loop over lists

We showed how to loop over lists earlier in this book, but it’s worth showing the syntax again. Given a List like this:

val names = List("Joel", "Chris", "Ed")

you can print each string like this:

for (name <- names) println(name)

This is what it looks like in the REPL:

scala> for (name <- names) println(name)
Joel
Chris
Ed

A great thing about this approach is that it works with all sequence classes, including ArrayBuffer, List, Seq, Vector, etc.

A little bit of history

If you’re interested in a little bit of history, the List class is very similar to the List class from the Lisp programming language. Indeed, in addition to creating a List like this:

val ints = List(1, 2, 3)

you can also create the exact same list this way:

val list = 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: Nil

The REPL shows how this works:

scala> val list = 1 :: 2 :: 3 :: Nil
list: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3)

This works because a List is a singly-linked list that ends with the Nil element.