Question

How to define Default parameters in Scala? What is the use of Default Parameters in Scala? How to avoid implementing Auxiliary Constructors or Multiple Constructors in Scala?

Answer 1

Scala provides the ability to give parameters default values that can be used to allow a caller to omit those parameters.

In Java, one tends to see a lot of overloaded methods that only serve to provide default values for certain parameters of a large method. This is especially true with constructors:

public class HashMap<K,V> {
  public HashMap(Map<? extends K,? extends V> m);
  /** Create a new HashMap with default capacity (16)
    * and loadFactor (0.75)
    */
  public HashMap();
  /** Create a new HashMap with default loadFactor (0.75) */
  public HashMap(int initialCapacity);
  public HashMap(int initialCapacity, float loadFactor);
}

There’s really only two constructors here; one that takes another map, and one that takes a capacity and load factor. The third and fourth constructors are there to allow users of HashMap to create instances with the probably-good-for-most-cases defaults of both load factor and capacity.

More problematic is that the values used for defaults are in both the Javadoc and the code. Keeping this up to date is easily forgotten. A typical pattern around this would be to add public constants whose values will show up in the Javadoc:

public class HashMap<K,V> {
  public static final int DEFAULT_CAPACITY = 16;
  public static final float DEFAULT_LOAD_FACTOR = 0.75;
  public HashMap(Map<? extends K,? extends V> m);
  /** Create a new HashMap with default capacity (16)
    * and loadFactor (0.75)
    */
  public HashMap();
  /** Create a new HashMap with default loadFactor (0.75) */
  public HashMap(int initialCapacity);
  public HashMap(int initialCapacity, float loadFactor);
}

While this keeps us from repeating ourselves, it’s less than expressive.

Scala adds direct support for this:

class HashMap[K,V](initialCapacity:Int = 16, loadFactor:Float = 0.75f) {
}
// Uses the defaults
val m1 = new HashMap[String,Int]
// initialCapacity 20, default loadFactor
val m2= new HashMap[String,Int](20)
// overriding both
val m3 = new HashMap[String,Int](20,0.8f)
// override only the loadFactor via
// named arguments
val m4 = new HashMap[String,Int](loadFactor = 0.8f)