Functional Programming in Scala

Chapter 5. Strictness and laziness

In chapter 3 we talked about purely functional data structures, using singly linked lists as an example. We covered a number of bulk operations on lists—map, filter, foldLeft, foldRight, zipWith, and so on. We noted that each of these operations makes its own pass over the input and constructs a fresh list for the output.

Imagine if you had a deck of cards and you were asked to remove the odd-numbered cards and then flip over all the queens. Ideally, you’d make a single pass through the deck, looking for queens and odd-numbered cards at the same time. This is more efficient than removing the odd cards and then looking for queens in the remainder. And yet the latter is what Scala is doing in the following code: ...