Some-None-Option
What you’ll learn in this blog post -
- Scala’s response to Java’s mistake of creating null.
If you’ve ever worked in Java, you definitely know about the NullPointerException. A NullPointerException occurs when you try to access an object (without handling the null case), but then it was a null. NullPointerExceptions are really common in Java and one reason for this is that there is no way for a developer to communicate to either self or another developer that the value for an object is Optional.
Scala tries to solve the problem by providing a type for representing optional values, i.e. values that may be present or not: the Option[A] trait. Option[A] is a container for an optional value of type A. If the value of type A is present, the Option[A] is an instance of Some[A], containing the present value of type A. If the value is absent, the Option[A] is the object None.
Options are also used in pattern matching (we’ll cover about this in the next blog post). We’ll also look at a more cleaner way of handling None when we learn about FlatMap.
Kaushik Rangadurai
Code. Learn. Explore