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

Pattern matching


Pattern matching is more like Java's switch statements with a few differences. With one expression/value to match against several case statements, whenever a match happens, the corresponding block of code is executed. This gives more than one option for our program flow to follow. Java's switch is a fall-through statement, which means it executes all the statements after the very first match until it confronts a break statement. In Scala, there's no break statement. Also, there's no default case in Scala's pattern matching. Instead, a wildcard "­_" is used that matches against any other case that has not been covered in previous case statements.

Let's have a look at the syntactical difference between Java's switch and Scala's pattern matching statements:

The difference is obvious, as we already discussed. In Scala, we have to provide a case matching to our expression, otherwise the compiler will throw an error, MatchError:

object PatternMatching extends App {

   def matchAgainst...