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

Type parameterization


For an introduction to type parameterization, we'll refer to two examples we've already seen to try to make some sense of it. I know you're following the chapter with interest and you've gone through the examples and concepts we've talked about, so let's do an exercise. Think of our savior, Option[T] type and try to think why you would want to pass a type (as it requires T to be a type) to Option. What purpose can it serve?

I think you've come up with some idea. Maybe you thought that by passing a type of our choice, we can make our code with the Option type work in more than one scenario. If you thought so, great! Let's call it generalizing our solution. And moreover, let's call the approach a generic approach to programming. How does it look? Let's take a look at the following code:

object TypeParameterization { 
 
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = { 
      val mayBeAnInteger = Some("101") 
      val mayBeADouble = Some("101.0") 
      val mayBeTrue = Some("true...