lazy sequences in scala

At work, some of us were discussing about lazy lists v/s iterators. I just tried a quick lazy list in scala, and it worked pretty well to my satisfaction.

class roleNumbers extends RandomAccessSeq[String] {

def length=10;
def apply(n:Int) = {println(“evalutaing ” + n); “role:” + n}

}

val xyz = new roleNumbers

// drop 8 elements, map the sequence, and then take first element
val one_element = xyz.drop(8).map(“rum ” + _)(0)

println (one_element)

The output :

evalutaing 8
rum role:8

The laziness is preserved across list operations which is a good thing.

In fact, I notice that Iterator trait and List trait have a similar interface, which reinforces my belief that they are pretty much the same, though usage semantics might be differ slightly.

I now need to figure out how to implement an efficient get_next_element kind of iterator in scala.