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 bounds


We've seen an example where we were allowed to create AircraftSeat for passengers. The example looked like the following:

class AircraftSeat[-T] 

From what we know so far, Aircraft is contravariant in its type parameter T. But the thing is, when it comes to creating instances of AircraftSeat, it can be created for any type of T. What's expected is that this type parameter can only be of the Passengers type or it's subtype. So to achieve that we can introduce a type bound, in our case we'll use an upper-type bound. The reason for this is because we want to specify the type that's on the top of the inheritance hierarchy, in our case it's Passengers.

It'll look as follows:

  class AircraftSeat[-T <: Passengers] 

Here, the notation <: specifies its upper bound. What does this do? Let's check out an example to understand it better:

object Bounds extends App { 
 
   /* 
    * AircraftSeats can be consumed only by Passengers. 
    */ 
  class AircraftSeat[-T <: Passengers] 
 
  def...