Groovy Int operations in Scala

Today, I briefly opened a book on Groovy, looked at the first line, and it said something like this:

10.times(print it)

... and I realized Scala doesn't have it. Now obviously, you can do this:

(1 to 10) foreach(println(_))

... but that seems slightly more complicated than what Groovy has to offer. No worries. Let's fix that:

class SmartInt(i: Int) {
def times(block: Int => Unit): Unit = (1 to i) foreach { j => block(j) }
def times(block: => Unit): Unit = (1 to i) foreach { i => block }
}
implicit def int2SmartInt(i: Int) = new SmartInt(i)

Now, I can call times on an Int, passing in either a parameterless block, or a function accepting an Int.

3 times println("foo")
3 times { println("foo") }
3 times { println(_) }
3 times { i => println(i) }

Note that SmartInt defines two operations called times(...); one with and one without a parameter. I figured that - in case of times(...) - it would be pretty normal to have it accept a function that ignores the value. If we would only have had the first operation, you would always have to capture the parameter, and then ignore it. With the second version of times(...), you can pass in an arbitrary expression ignoring the parameter carrying the current element.