I'm running into a weird situation in some Scala code I'm writing (more on why in a later post), and I'm curious to know from my Scala-ish followers if this is a bug or intentional/"by design".

Because it’s my bag, I’ve recently taken to learning Scala. In particular, I’ve run across some situations where I’ve known instinctively that a more functional language (i.e. one that avoids state ...