Functional Tendencies
While supporting all of the object-oriented features available in Java (and in fact, augmenting them in various ways), Scala also provides a large number of capabilities that are normally found only in functional programming languages. Together, these features allow Scala programs to be written in an almost completely functional style, and also allow functional and object-oriented styles to be mixed.
Examples are:
- No distinction between statements and expressions
- Type inference
- Anonymous functions with capturing semantics (i.e. closures)
- Immutable variables and objects
- Lazy evaluation
- Delimited continuations (since 2.8)
- higher-order functions
- nested functions
- currying
- pattern matching
- algebraic data types (through "case classes")
- tuples
Read more about this topic: Scala (programming Language), Features (with Reference To Java)
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