It is a Monoid

Hark back a bit dear reader. If you recall, we had said that a Monoid needs to be associative and should have an identity value.

Instead of using groupBy and friends, we can instead think of the collections as monoids and use foldLeft. Here is an example of how we do this:

scala> val list = List("x" -> "y", "z" -> "c", "x" -> "p", "z" -> "d") // 1
list: List[(String, String)] = List((x,y), (z,c), (x,p), (z,d))
scala> Map[String, List[String]]() // 2
acc: scala.collection.immutable.Map[String,List[String]] = Map()
scala> list.foldLeft(acc) { (a, b) =>
     |   a + (b._1 -> (b._2 :: a.getOrElse(b._1, Nil)))
     | } // 3
res0: scala.collection.immutable.Map[String,List[String]] = Map(x -> List(p, y), z -> List(d, c))

The salient points of the preceding code are as follows:

• Here, we have an input list of pairs that we need to convert into a map.
• As the identity value...