Explicitly Typed Self References

When developing extensible software it is sometimes handy to declare the type of the value this explicitly. To motivate this, we will derive a small extensible representation of a graph data structure in Scala.

Here is a definition describing graphs:

abstract class Graph {
  type Edge
  type Node <: NodeIntf
  abstract class NodeIntf {
    def connectWith(node: Node): Edge
  }
  def nodes: List[Node]
  def edges: List[Edge]
  def addNode: Node
}

Graphs consist of a list of nodes and edges where both the node and the edge type are left abstract. The use of abstract types allows implementations of trait Graph to provide their own concrete classes for nodes and edges. Furthermore, there is a method addNode for adding new nodes to a graph. Nodes are connected using method connectWith.

A possible implementation of class Graph is given in the next class:

abstract class DirectedGraph extends Graph {
  type Edge <: EdgeImpl
  class EdgeImpl(origin: Node, dest: Node) {
    def from = origin
    def to = dest
  }
  class NodeImpl extends NodeIntf {
    def connectWith(node: Node): Edge = {
      val edge = newEdge(this, node)
      edges = edge :: edges
      edge
    }
  }
  protected def newNode: Node
  protected def newEdge(from: Node, to: Node): Edge
  var nodes: List[Node] = Nil
  var edges: List[Edge] = Nil
  def addNode: Node = {
    val node = newNode
    nodes = node :: nodes
    node
  }
}

Class DirectedGraph specializes the Graph class by providing a partial implementation. The implementation is only partial, because we would like to be able to extend DirectedGraph further. Therefore this class leaves all implementation details open and thus both the edge and the node type are left abstract. Nevertheless, class DirectedGraph reveals some additional details about the implementation of the edge type by tightening the bound to class EdgeImpl. Furthermore, we have some preliminary implementations of edges and nodes represented by the classes EdgeImpl and NodeImpl. Since it is necessary to create new node and edge objects within our partial graph implementation, we also have to add the factory methods newNode and newEdge. The methods addNode and connectWith are both defined in terms of these factory methods. A closer look at the implementation of method connectWith reveals that for creating an edge, we have to pass the self reference this to the factory method newEdge. But this is assigned the type NodeImpl, so it's not compatible with type Node which is required by the corresponding factory method. As a consequence, the program above is not well-formed and the Scala compiler will issue an error message.

In Scala it is possible to tie a class to another type (which will be implemented in future) by giving self reference this the other type explicitly. We can use this mechanism for fixing our code above. The explicit self type is specified within the body of the class DirectedGraph.

Here is the fixed program:

abstract class DirectedGraph extends Graph {
  ...
  class NodeImpl extends NodeIntf {
    self: Node =>
    def connectWith(node: Node): Edge = {
      val edge = newEdge(this, node)  // now legal
      edges = edge :: edges
      edge
    }
  }
  ...
}

In this new definition of class NodeImpl, this has type Node. Since type Node is abstract and we therefore don't know yet if NodeImpl is really a subtype of Node, the type system of Scala will not allow us to instantiate this class. But nevertheless, we state with the explicit type annotation of this that at some point, (a subclass of) NodeImpl has to denote a subtype of type Node in order to be instantiatable.

Here is a concrete specialization of DirectedGraph where all abstract class members are turned into concrete ones:

class ConcreteDirectedGraph extends DirectedGraph {
  type Edge = EdgeImpl
  type Node = NodeImpl
  protected def newNode: Node = new NodeImpl
  protected def newEdge(f: Node, t: Node): Edge =
    new EdgeImpl(f, t)
}

Please note that in this class, we can instantiate NodeImpl because now we know that NodeImpl denotes a subtype of type Node (which is simply an alias for NodeImpl).

Here is a usage example of class ConcreteDirectedGraph:

object GraphTest extends App {
  val g: Graph = new ConcreteDirectedGraph
  val n1 = g.addNode
  val n2 = g.addNode
  val n3 = g.addNode
  n1.connectWith(n2)
  n2.connectWith(n3)
  n1.connectWith(n3)
}

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