To recap, the fundamental types you've seen in the previous sessions were primitive types, functions and classes. It's fair to ask whether these three forms of types are necessary or whether we could express maybe our types as classes? We'll discuss that question in this section and the next one. First in this session we'll look at primitive types and see how they can be represented as classes. So, so far we've seen Scala as a functional programming language. I'm now going to argue that Scala is actually also object oriented, and that it's object oriented and that it's object oriented in a very pure form. So a pure object oriented language, the definition would be one in which every value is an object, and also every operation is then essentially a method call on some object. If the language is based on classes this means that the type of each value would be a class. So now lets ask ourselves, is color pure object oriented language? At first glance there seemed to be some exceptions. For instance we have seem primitive types such as [UNKNWON] and double of these objects. We've also seen functions. They don't look like objects at first glance, but lets look somewhat closer. Let's look at the primitive types first. So the standard classes such as Int or booleans conceptually they actually don't receive any special treatment in Scala. You can treat them just like other classes you find in the packaged Scala subclasses of class eneval. It's true that for reasons of efficiency in the Int this scala compiler will represent the values of types scala Int say by 32-bit integers, the values of type scala booleans by java booleans and so on. But that, you could treat simply as an optimization and as a measure to improve the interoperability between Scala code and Java code. Conceptually, these things can be treated just like normal classes. And instances of integer can, or Boolean can be treated just like normal objects. So let's see how this could be done. You know that the Boolean type maps to the JVMs primitive type Boolean. But one can define it as a class without any changes in the user code from first principles without resort to primitive Booleans. Here's how this could be done. We put it in a package idealized Scala to make clear that's actually, the class Boolean that is not the same as the primitive type that we use in normal Scala. That class Boolean here, then. It would have one abstract method which we call ifThenElse. It's a parameterized method. It, it contains a type parameter T and the then part, Which I- I'm calling here simply T, and an Else part. Both the Then part and the Else part take an expression of type T. And the result of the ifThenElse, then, would be T. So the idea would be that I would write, instead of if some condition, Boolean condition. And then some then expression Else, Else expression. I would translate that to the if then else method call of my condition, So it would be condition.ifThenElse, Then whatever type t-e and e-e would have I'm leaving that out. And I'll pass t-e and e-e as the two arguments to the ifThenElse method. That will be the translation for simulating Booleans. Now once I have ifThenElse, how would I define the other operators on Booleans like the conjunction and disjunction, double am- ampersand. Actually turns out that all the other operations on Booleans can be defined in terms of ifThenElse. So let's look at && for instance. The & operation would take another boolean, or rather an expression of type boolean, because we know that it will be evaluated in a short-circuited fashion. And it would then call ifThenElse with x and false. So what this means is that, if the Boolean itself is true, then you would return the second argument, The Boolean argument x. On the other hand, if the left hand operant, the Boolean here itself is false, then the result is immediately false. And the same tricks you can also apply to all the other methods on Booleans. So for instance, for the disjunction here, you'd again take the call by name parameter x, that's the right hand operand. And it says, well, if the Boolean itself is true, then the result is immediately true. Whereas if the, the boolean itself is false, then the result is whatever the right hand side argument is. The third one would be the not-negational operation, which we write here as unary-not. So unary-not would simply be implemented as ifThenElse false, true, that means if the Boolean itself is true, we return false. If the Boolean itself is false, we return true. Let's look at the equality and disequality next. We would say well, if, to find out whether two Booleans are equal, we can go to the ifThenElse method. And say, well, if the Boolean itself is true, then the result is whatever the argument is. So, if the argument is also true, then the result would be true. If the argument is false, then the equals test would be false. So the result of the equals test is exactly the same as the value of the argument. On the other hand, if the current Boolean is false then the result would be the negation of the argument. Let's again go through the, the possibilities. So we say the current Boolean is false, the argument is false then the equality test should give true. And, here we would have the negation operator on the argument false, so we would get true, that's correct. If the argument on the other hand is TRUE, the, the result should be FALSE. False equals to TRUE get FALSE and again, here TRUE.unary bang gives FALSE. And, for not equal, it is completely analogous. So once we have that outline, we still have to define the Boolean constants false and true. By now, it should be clear that the, this false and this true. They can't be the primitive Booleans. Because we passed them to an ifThenElse together with one of our idealized Booleans. So false and true must themselves be constants of type idealized Scala Boolean. So here's how we would define them. Each of those of would be an object, and for the true constants, the only thing I need to do is define what the definition of ifThenElse should be for that constant. So what is the definition of if , true, then.then Expression Else, Else expression. Well, we've seen the rewrite tool. We've decided that would be then, Then expressions.. So what you see here is precisely the implementation of that rewrite tool. We say ifThenElse so for Then expression and then Else expression gives us the Then part. And conversely ifThenElse of a Then part and an Else part in the false constant would give us the Else part. That's all there is to it. So, let's do an exercise. Let's complete the definition of Booleans with a, a comparison operator that shows how we would compare two Booleans with a less than operation. And we assume for this that, the order is that false, the value false would be less than the value true. So, let's see how we would do that. So what we are after is in our class Boolean. You want to define to a method def less, which takes an x of type Boolean And which calls if ifThenElse because that's all we ever can do with some arguments. So what should the arguments be? Well, lets go through the motions if the current Boolean is true then we go in the Then part. So the left-hand side is true then obviously the left-hand side can never be less than the other one. So we would return false. On the other hand, if the current Boolean is false, then the less operation yields true. If the argument is true, false if it is false. So it is the same as the argument expression, x. So here, you have the solution for the less operation. And of course, all the other comparison operators less than or = is greater than or equals greater would behave in analogous ways. But now that we have boolean, let's look at class int. Don't worry, I won't give you a full implementation of class int that will be a bit too involved. But here's at least what's a partial specification what methods it would support. Let's start with plus. So, the int class would have a method plus that takes an other int and yields an int. But actually, you can also write an expression such as one + 2.0. And you would expect the result to be a double. So there's another operation that takes a double, and yields a double end for the motor operations, for floats and longs as well. In each case, the result type is the high, the, the greater type of the left hand operand, or the right hand operand. So, now we have plus and you do exactly the same thing for minus for multiplication, for division and modulo. The one thing I haven't said explicitly yet is that Scala has overloading very similar to what Java had. So, it's perfectly possible to have four versions of the plus method that all take different arguments. The Scala compiler would then figure out what method to, to call based on the type of the actual arguments in the method call. Other operations we see on this slide are the left shift operation, which takes shift count and gives you back an int, and bit wise and operations that work with either long arguments or int arguments. And finally, there are equality operations that would also then take a range of arguments like ints, doubles, floats, and longs, and give us Boolean results. So you see that all the operations on ints can be expressed as methods, if you just look at the signatures. But, the question remains, can we also implement them without resorting to primitive integers, to primitive types. So, the question is, can we maybe implement all of programming using just objects and functions? No primitive types at all. So we want to do that for class int but as an exercise I would like you to try that for something slightly simpler a class of natural numbers. So that's just integers starting from zero and positive integers but not negative integers and I also assume that in this class has only a sub-set of the operations that you would assume for int's. So, the methods I'd like you to implement are five. The first is, the test is zero, which tests whether a given natural number is zero. The second is predecessor, which should return for a positive natural number, the one before that, and should throw an exception if the natural number is zero. The successor, which gives you the next natural number after the current natural number. And finally, addition and subtraction operations on natural numbers. Again, for the subtraction, you, I would assume that the code will throw an exception if the result is negative. So, you should not use the standard primitive classes in your implementation neither int nor any other primitive class. Instead you should implement a sub object in the subclass. Call it zero and successor. So, the zero object would represent the number zero, where is the successor of n would represent the natural number that's one bigger than the argument and here. I should say that this quiz is quite a bit more involved than previous quizzes. So, you'll need some time to get it right. But, it's worth it for, I believe for the insight that you will gain from it. So let's see how we would solve this problem. I've already, created a class net with the signatures that we've discussed in Eclipse. And all we need to do now is create the zero object and the successor class. Let's start with the zero object, so. So the zero object would extend not. And we need to implement all our five operation, Iszero obviously would return true. Predecessor for the zero object that doesn't exist so we throw an exception. If you don't know which exception to throw we can always throw error, Which says maybe 0.predecessor. Successor, Would be. Well, you will need the second class, which is called successor off the current value. This. And then we have plus and minus. And I leave that out for the moment. Let's turn to the class successor. So it takes a given, natural number. That's the predecessor, and it's also an extension of Not. So we need to implement its operations. Is zero, obviously is false The predecessor of the current number would be. Well, it would be the number that we pass into, the successor because the successor represents the number one plus the given number here. So it's predecessor is N. The successor would be new successor of this. That's just like in the empty number. So what we see here is that actually, we have some duplication where we say. No matter whether the number is zero or successor, the successor of this number is always new successor of this. So what we can do is, we can actually do a refactoring, and move that up here. In the base class, because it holds uniformly for both of the subclasses. So let's see whether we can do the same thing for plus and minus. So let's turn to addition. Zero plus some natural number would be, well, just the natural number we pass here. That was easy. Let's try to do the same thing for successor zero plus some natural number Not would be. Well what, what do we do in that case? What we can do, is we can have a recursive call, N plus that. And that would give us a number that was one smaller than the sum because our current number is one larger than N. So all we need to do is we need to create the successor of that. And that would be the result. So let's turn to the minus operation. In the case of zero minus some natural number, we would have two cases, if the argument is zero. Then we return a zero, which is just in this case, the number itself, and otherwise we would go in to the negatives so we can again throw an error. Let's look at the case for minors in successor. So how would we go about that well one tempting thing would be to do it as plus. You say, well, it would be at the successor of N minus the natural number. But that wouldn't be correct, because that would mean that we would essentially go down here until we hit zero, but then we would throw an exception. So, we need to find another way to do it. So the idea here is that we start with N, and then we subtract the predecessor of the argument. So that would work because now N is one smaller than the current natural number here, where as that the previous asset is one smaller than the argument. So we take one of both sides so the result of the subtraction is the same as the original subtraction. You've seen that, that gives us a complete and rather concise definition of natural numbers. Form first principles, we didn't need anything else in there. There's actually a technical term for this construction. It's called piano numbers. And starting from these piano numbers we could also implement and further the integers so including negative numbers and even floating point numbers.
