[akeefer]

But again, other languages do offer the ability to write methods that apply to all collections, without the "complexity." Sure, it's different, but in Gosu for example you can write an enhancement method on the Collection interface, or on the List interface, and now everything that implements Collection or List has that method. It's then a matter of whether or not the objects in question implement that appropriate interface or not. Your new functions apply to everything that implements those interfaces, and if you want a new thing to have all those methods then you just implement the interface and you get all 50+ functions for free.

Scala offers a particular way to solve that problem that has its own plusses and minuses, but it's not the only way for a language to let you do that, and it's certainly not the "simplest" way to accomplish that goal.

[modersky]

Arrays are not collections, either in Scala, or in the blog's condensation of it. But the blog nevertheless tries to define a single extension method that works for both sequences and arrays. I do not think this problem has a simple solution in any language.

[akeefer]

That's a fair point; there's no simple way that I know of to do that in any language (though many languages avoid having both constructs), and the general solution is to write parallel sets of methods to operate on the two types of data structures.