Question

I’m just starting out with the Scala and am trying a little toy program – in this case a text based TicTacToe. I wrote a working version based on what I know about scala, but noticed it was mostly imperative and my classes were mutable.

I’m going through and trying to implement some functional idioms and have managed to at least make the classes representing the game state immutable. However, I’m left with a class responsible for performing the game loop relying on mutable state and imperative loop as follows:

  var board: TicTacToeBoard = new TicTacToeBoard

  def start() {
    var gameState: GameState = new XMovesNext
    outputState(gameState)
    while (!gameState.isGameFinished) {
      val position: Int = getSelectionFromUser
      board = board.updated(position, gameState.nextTurn)
      gameState = getGameState(board)
      outputState(gameState)      
    }
  }

What would be a more idiomatic way to program what I’m doing imperatively in this loop?

Full source code is here https://github.com/whaley/TicTacToe-in-Scala/tree/master/src/main/scala/com/jasonwhaley/tictactoe

Answer 1

You could implement it as a recursive method. Here’s an unrelated example:

object Guesser extends App {
  val MIN = 1
  val MAX = 100

  readLine("Think of a number between 1 and 100. Press enter when ready")

  def guess(max: Int, min: Int) {
    val cur = (max + min) / 2
    readLine("Is the number "+cur+"? (y/n) ") match {
      case "y" => println("I thought so")
      case "n" => {
        def smallerGreater() { 
          readLine("Is it smaller or greater? (s/g) ") match {
            case "s" => guess(cur - 1, min)
            case "g" => guess(max, cur + 1)
            case _   => smallerGreater()
          }
        }
        smallerGreater()
      }
      case _   => {
        println("Huh?")
        guess(max, min)
      } 
    }
  }

  guess(MAX, MIN)
}