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

Implicit conversions


The Standard Scala FAQ page describes implicit conversions as: "If one calls a method m on an object o of a class C and that class C does not support method m, then Scala compiler will look for an implicit conversion from C type to something that does support m method".

The idea is clear: it's a synthetic behavior (using a method) that we're forcing on instances of a particular type, and these behaviors (methods) aren't a part of the defined type. It's like we have a library with certain functionalities already available and we want to give some add-on functionality to a certain type from the library. Think about it—this is powerful. Having the ability to add on a functionality for a particular type is itself powerful. And that's what implicits let us do. We'll try our hand at something like the following.

First, think of a scenario where we want to create some syntax methods. We have a few methods available for the date-time library java.time.LocalDate that can help us...