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

Function literals


We can pass a function in the form of a literal to another function, to work for us. Let's take the same compareIntegers function example:

def compareIntegersV6(value1: Int = 10, value2: Int): Int = ??? 

We know what our function is supposed to do: take two integer numbers as input and return an integer response telling us the result of our comparison. If we take a look at the abstract form of our function, it will look like this:

(value1: Int, value2: Int) => Int     

This means that the function is expecting two integers, and returning an integer response; our need is the same. It's an abstract form that indicates that elements on the left are inputs and elements on the right are the response type for our function. We can say that this is in its literal form, also called function literals. Hence, it's also possible to assign this literal to any variable:

val compareFuncLiteral = (value1: Int, value2: Int) => if (value1 == value2) 0 else if (value1 > value2) 1 else...