Question

I have a val:

val something = System.nanoTime

that then goes through a series of method calls:

foo(something) {
  bar(something, 2) { etc }
}

I’d like to defer val resolution until a very last method that actually does something with it. I’m aware of scala’s lazy modifier, but it seems that passing something as a parameter automatically resolves it’s value, regardless if the variable is being used or not inside that method.

My (somewhat ugly) solution so far is:

val something = () => System.nanoTime

Although this works, it involves changing all the method signatures, in this case from Long to () => Long. I guess there might be a more elegant way of solving it, what do you guys think?

Answer 1

It’s not possible to do this without changing the signatures, however you should use x: => Long instead of x: () => Long. The first is a so called by name parameter. A by name parameter will be evaluated, every time you call it. So in total it would look like:

def foo(x: => Long) = {
  x + 12 // x will be evaluated here
}

lazy val x = 12L
foo(x)