Even though generally speaking, I am against choosing symbolic programming over verbose and well-readable code, I have to admit that this code snippet taken from the Wikipedia entry on Scala is nothing short of beautiful:
def qsort(list: List[Int]): List[Int] = list match { case Nil => Nil case pivot :: tail => { val (smaller, rest) = tail.partition(_ < pivot) qsort(smaller) ::: pivot :: qsort(rest) } }