Programming Scala

Chapter 5. Basic Object-Oriented Programming in Scala

Scala is an object-oriented language like Java, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and others. If you’re coming from the Java world, you’ll notice some notable improvements over the limitations of Java’s object model.

We assume you have some prior experience with object-oriented programming (OOP), so we will not discuss the basic principles here, although some common terms and concepts are discussed in the Glossary. See [Meyer1997] for a detailed introduction to OOP; see [Martin2003] for a recent treatment of OOP principles in the context of “agile software development”; see [GOF1995] to learn about design patterns; and see [WirfsBrock2003] for a discussion of object-oriented design concepts.

Class and Object Basics

Let’s review the terminology of OOP in Scala.

Note

We saw previously that Scala has the concept of a declared object, which we’ll dig into in Classes and Objects: Where Are the Statics?. We’ll use the term instance to refer to a class instance generically, meaning either an object or an instance of a class, to avoid the potential for confusion between these two concepts.

Classes are declared with the keyword class. We will see later that additional keywords can also be used, like final to prevent creation of derived classes and abstract to indicate that the class can’t be instantiated, usually because it contains or inherits member declarations without providing concrete definitions for them.

An instance can refer to itself using ...