Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Implicits - what and why


What are implicits? When we talk about implicits, we mean implicit parameters or conversions that happen implicitly. Implicit parameters are the ones that come along with a keyword, implicit, and we don't have to explicitly pass an argument for these parameters if they were in Scope. Let's see how.

Let's take an example, and create a Future value. A Future is nothing but a computation (that we provide) that's going to happen at a later point in time. It means a computation that's going to happen in the future. We'll talk about Future values in depth when we discuss concurrent programming techniques in Chapter 13, Concurrent Programming in Scala. Let's write a code snippet for now:

import scala.concurrent.Future 
 
object FuturesApp extends App { 
 
  val futureComp = Future { 
     1 + 1 
  } 
 
  println(s"futureComp: $futureComp") 
 
  futureComp.map(result => println(s"futureComp: $result")) 
} 

Okay, we are not sure about how this Future thing works, but from...