Summary
In this chapter, we provided an overview of ScalaLab—an interactive computing environment written in Java that uses Scala as a scripting language. The Scala interpreter automatically loads various extensions to Scala when ScalaLab is started. For example, classes representing vectors and matrices of doubles are automatically loaded; so are various methods that operate on these data structures.
We provided a quick overview of this functionality. We also explored the plotting facilities provided by ScalaLab. These are modeled after those found in MATLAB, like many things in ScalaLab.
You learned to do simple two-dimensional plots, multiple subplots on the same figure, as well as three-dimensional plots. We then moved to the symbolic algebra capabilities that ScalaLab provides with the help of the symja symbolic algebra package for Java. After reading this chapter, the reader should be able to install and run ScalaLab and perform basic interactive computing tasks with it.