Scala code often needs to deal with null references, unfortunately. Such is the price of Java interoperability. One of my favourite utility methods is:
Scala 2.8 offers this using Option(ref) instead of ?(ref). However, I can't figure out why the Scala 2.8 method accepts non-reference values as well.
Another simple thing that may come in handy is an extractor for non-null values:
What's the advantage of using an extractor? Say you have a collection of references, some of which may be null, and you want to ignore the null references:
