Small design issues

Recently I’ve found that I cannot use anonymous matching function with specs2 Mockito’s answers function. I wanted to do something like this:

mock.getValue(any) answers {
 case i: Int => i + 1
}

But compiler issued an error that argument type of anonymous function should be fully known. A small “investigation” showed that answers function has 2 overloads: Any => T and (Any, Any) => T. In this case the only thing you may do it’s use regular pattern matching:

mock.getValue(any) answers (_ match {
 case i: Int => i + 1
})

And it could be the end of a story but IDEA highlighted it with a warning/suggestion to convert it to an anonymous pattern matching function. After conversion I’ve got the same non-compilable code. So I decided to introduce a new method (responds) to a specs2 Mockito library that allow me to use anonymous p-m function. And in a couple days it was merged.

It’s hard to predict how your library will be used. An overloading always seemed to me as a good and pretty thing. But in Scala world it could be not so good as in Java/C#/C++ worlds. And thanks to IDEA’s bug that forced me to contribute a little to specs2 :)