Cartesian product of two lists

I could come up with this:

val conversion = Map('0' -> Seq("A", "B"), '1' -> Seq("C", "D"))

def permut(str: Seq[Char]): Seq[String] = str match {
  case Seq()  => Seq.empty
  case Seq(c) => conversion(c)
  case Seq(head, tail @ _*) =>
    val t = permut(tail)
    conversion(head).flatMap(pre => t.map(pre + _))
}

permut("011")

The following suggestion is not using a for-comprehension. But I don't think it's a good idea after all, because as you noticed you'd be tied to a certain length of your cartesian product.

scala> def cartesianProduct[T](xss: List[List[T]]): List[List[T]] = xss match {
     |   case Nil => List(Nil)
     |   case h :: t => for(xh <- h; xt <- cartesianProduct(t)) yield xh :: xt
     | }
cartesianProduct: [T](xss: List[List[T]])List[List[T]]

scala> val conversion = Map('0' -> List("A", "B"), '1' -> List("C", "D"))
conversion: scala.collection.immutable.Map[Char,List[java.lang.String]] = Map(0 -> List(A, B), 1 -> List(C, D))

scala> cartesianProduct("01".map(conversion).toList)
res9: List[List[java.lang.String]] = List(List(A, C), List(A, D), List(B, C), List(B, D))

Why not tail-recursive?

Note that above recursive function is not tail-recursive. This isn't a problem, as xss will be short unless you have a lot of singleton lists in xss. This is the case, because the size of the result grows exponentially with the number of non-singleton elements of xss.