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

Calling a function


We can call a function to perform the task we defined for it. While calling, we pass the arguments that the function takes as input parameters. This can be achieved in a variety of ways: we can specify a variable number of arguments, we can specify the name of the argument, or we can specify a default value to consider in case the argument is not passed while calling the function. Let's take a scenario where we are not sure about the number of arguments to be passed to a function for evaluation but we are sure about the type of it.

Passing a variable number of arguments

If you remember, we've already seen an example for functions that take a variable number of arguments and perform operations on them in the previous chapter:

 /* 
  * Prints pages with given Indexes for doc 
  */ 
  def printPages(doc: Document, indexes: Int*) = for(index <- indexes if index <= doc.numOfPages) print(index) 

Our method takes index numbers and prints those pages from the document passed...