The Scala Programming Language

Published on 10 April 2018 (Updated: 02 October 2024)

Welcome to the Scala page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

This article was written by:

Jeremy Grifski
Ron Zuckerman

Description

According to Wikipedia, Scala is another general-purpose programming language. Likewise, Scala is a multi-paradigm language. However, it does have functional capabilities, so I think it fits nicely into our recent string of functional languages: Lisp, Scheme, Racket, etc.

Now, Scala is a relatively new language. In fact, it was released in 2004, almost ten years after the release of Java. I mention Java because Scala was actually designed to correct many of Java's problems. For instance, here's a list of some of Scala's features: a unified type system, syntactic flexibility, functional tendencies, and object-oriented extensions.

At this point, I should probably share an example to illustrate some of these differences, but I think Wikipedia already shares several excellent examples. In addition, I dug up a couple decent blogs comparing the two languages:

Since Scala has functional tendencies, I figured I'd dig into that a bit too. As it turns out, everything in Scala is an expression. And as a result, every expression is a function. This means that return statements are not required and are actually discouraged:

val myGrade = if (score >= 70) "Pass" else "Fail"

For those familiar with Java, this example probably looks odd. Fortunately, the solution is simple. Just evaluate the if-else expression and store the expected result in myGrade. If score is 90, then myGrade would store "Pass." That's pretty cool stuff!

At any rate, we probably shouldn't dive too much further. After all, we have yet to implement Hello World in Scala.

Articles

There are 11 articles: