What is the point of the class Option[T]?

Asked 2010-01-16T22:39:25.940

I am not able to understand the point of Option[T] class in Scala. I mean, I am not able to see any advanages of None over null.

For example, consider the code:

object Main{
  class Person(name: String, var age: int){
    def display = println(name+" "+age)
  }

  def getPerson1: Person = {
    // returns a Person instance or null
  }

  def getPerson2: Option[Person] = {
    // returns either Some[Person] or None
  }

  def main(argv: Array[String]): Unit = {
    val p = getPerson1
    if (p!=null) p.display

    getPerson2 match{
      case Some(person) => person.display
      case None => /* Do nothing */
    }
  }
}

Now suppose, the method getPerson1 returns null, then the call made to display on first line of main is bound to fail with NPE. Similarly if getPerson2 returns None, the display call will again fail with some similar error.

If so, then why does Scala complicate things by introducing a new value wrapper (Option[T]) instead of following a simple approach used in Java?

UPDATE:

I have edited my code as per @Mitch's suggestion. I am still not able to see any particular advantage of Option[T]. I have to test for the exceptional null or None in both cases. :(

If I have understood correctly from @Michael's reply, is the only advantage of Option[T] is that it explicitly tells the programmer that this method could return None? Is this the only reason behind this design choice?

Edit Report

2 Answers

One point that nobody else here seems to have raised is that while you can have a null reference, there is a distinction introduced by Option.

That is you can have Option[Option[A]], which would be inhabited by None, Some(None) and Some(Some(a)) where a is one of the usual inhabitants of A. This means that if you have some kind of container, and want to be able to store null pointers in it, and get them out, you need to pass back some extra boolean value to know if you actually got a value out. Warts like this abound in the java containers APIs and some lock-free variants can't even provide them.

null is a one-off construction, it doesn't compose with itself, it is only available for reference types, and it forces you to reason in a non-total fashion.

For instance, when you check

if (x == null) ...
else x.foo()

you have to carry around in your head throughout the else branch that x != null and that this has already been checked. However, when using something like option

x match {
case None => ...
case Some(y) => y.foo
}

you know y is not Noneby construction -- and you'd know it wasn't null either, if it weren't for Hoare's billion dollar mistake.

answered 2011-03-26T01:10:47.850

Adding on to Randall's teaser of an answer, understanding why the potential absence of a value is represented by Option requires understanding what Option shares with many other types in Scala—specifically, types modeling monads. If one represents the absence of a value with null, that absence-presence distinction can't participate in the contracts shared by the other monadic types.

If you don't know what monads are, or if you don't notice how they're represented in Scala's library, you won't see what Option plays along with, and you can't see what you're missing out on. There are many benefits to using Option instead of null that would be noteworthy even in the absence of any monad concept (I discuss some of them in the "Cost of Option / Some vs null" scala-user mailing list thread here), but talking about it isolation is kind of like talking about a particular linked list implementation's iterator type, wondering why it's necessary, all the while missing out on the more general container/iterator/algorithm interface. There's a broader interface at work here too, and Option provides a presence-and-absence model of that interface.

answered 2010-01-17T00:38:35.483

What is the point of the class Option[T]?

2 Answers

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