Book Image

Scala Design Patterns

By : Ivan Nikolov
Book Image

Scala Design Patterns

By: Ivan Nikolov

Overview of this book

Scala has become increasingly popular in many different IT sectors. The language is exceptionally feature-rich which helps developers write less code and get faster results. Design patterns make developer’s lives easier by helping them write great software that is easy to maintain, runs efficiently and is valuable to the company or people concerned. You will learn about the various features of Scala and be able to apply well-known, industry-proven design patterns in your work. The book starts off by focusing on some of the most interesting features of Scala while using practical real-world examples. We will also cover the popular "Gang of Four" design patterns and show you how to incorporate functional patterns effectively. By the end of this book, you will have enough knowledge and understanding to quickly assess problems and come up with elegant solutions.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Scala Design Patterns
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Multiple inheritance


We inevitably had to mention multiple inheritance in the previous sections due to the fact that we can mix multiple traits and they can all have their own implementations of the methods. Multiple inheritance is not only a powerful technique, but also a dangerous one, and some languages such as Java have decided to not even allow it. As we already saw, Scala allows this, but with some limitations. In this subsection, we will present the problems of multiple inheritance and show how Scala deals with them.

The diamond problem

Multiple inheritance suffers from the diamond problem.

Let's have a look at the following diagram:

Here, both B and C extend A and then D extends B and C. Some ambiguities might arise from this. Let's say that there was a method that was originally defined in A, but both B and C override it. What would happen if D calls this method? Which one will it exactly call?

All the preceding questions make things ambiguous and this could lead to mistakes. Let's...