A First Look at Types

All values have a type

In Scala, all values have a type, including numerical values and functions. The diagram below illustrates a subset of the type hierarchy.

Scala type hierarchy

Any is the supertype of all types, also called the top type. It defines certain universal methods such as equals, hashCode, and toString.

The top-type Any has a subtype Matchable, which is used to mark all types that we can perform pattern matching on. It is important to guarantee a property call “parametricity”. We will not go into details here, but in summary, it means that we cannot pattern match on values of type Any, but only on values that are a subtype of Matchable. The reference documentation contains more information about Matchable.

Matchable has two important subtypes: AnyVal and AnyRef.

AnyVal represents value types. There are a couple of predefined value types, and they are non-nullable: Double, Float, Long, Int, Short, Byte, Char, Unit, and Boolean. Unit is a value type which carries no meaningful information. There is exactly one instance of Unit which we can refer to as: ().

AnyRef represents reference types. All non-value types are defined as reference types. Every user-defined type in Scala is a subtype of AnyRef. If Scala is used in the context of a Java runtime environment, AnyRef corresponds to java.lang.Object.

In statement-based languages, void is used for methods that don’t return anything. If you write methods in Scala that have no return value, such as the following method, Unit is used for the same purpose:

def printIt(a: Any): Unit = println(a)

Here’s an example that demonstrates that strings, integers, characters, boolean values, and functions are all instances of Any and can be treated just like every other object:

val list: List[Any] = List(
  "a string",
  732,  // an integer
  'c',  // a character
  '\'', // a character with a backslash escape
  true, // a boolean value
  () => "an anonymous function returning a string"
)

list.foreach(element => println(element))

The code defines a value list of type List[Any]. The list is initialized with elements of various types, but each is an instance of scala.Any, so we can add them to the list.

Here’s the output of the program:

a string
732
c
'
true
<function>

Scala’s “value types”

As shown above, Scala’s numeric types extend AnyVal, and they’re all full-blown objects. These examples show how to declare variables of these numeric types:

val b: Byte = 1
val i: Int = 1
val l: Long = 1
val s: Short = 1
val d: Double = 2.0
val f: Float = 3.0

In the first four examples, if you don’t explicitly specify a type, the number 1 will default to an Int, so if you want one of the other data types—Byte, Long, or Short—you need to explicitly declare those types, as shown. Numbers with a decimal (like 2.0) will default to a Double, so if you want a Float you need to declare a Float, as shown in the last example.

Because Int and Double are the default numeric types, you typically create them without explicitly declaring the data type:

val i = 123   // defaults to Int
val x = 1.0   // defaults to Double

In your code you can also append the characters L, D, and F (and their lowercase equivalents) to numbers to specify that they are Long, Double, or Float values:

val x = 1_000L   // val x: Long = 1000
val y = 2.2D     // val y: Double = 2.2
val z = -3.3F    // val z: Float = -3.3

val a = 0xACE    // val a: Int = 2766
val b = 0xfd_3aL // val b: Long = 64826

val q = .25      // val q: Double = 0.25
val r = 2.5e-1   // val r: Double = 0.25
val s = .0025e2F // val s: Float = 0.25

Scala also has String and Char types, which you can generally declare with the implicit form:

val s = "Bill"
val c = 'a'

As shown, enclose strings in double-quotes—or triple-quotes for multiline strings—and enclose a character in single-quotes.

Those data types and their ranges are:

Strings

Scala strings are similar to Java strings though unlike Java (at least before Java 15), it’s easy to create multiline strings with triple quotes:

val quote = """The essence of Scala:
               Fusion of functional and object-oriented
               programming in a typed setting."""

One drawback of this basic approach is that the lines after the first line are indented, and look like this:

"The essence of Scala:
               Fusion of functional and object-oriented
               programming in a typed setting."

When spacing is important, put a | symbol in front of all lines after the first line, and call the stripMargin method after the string:

val quote = """The essence of Scala:
               |Fusion of functional and object-oriented
               |programming in a typed setting.""".stripMargin

Now all of the lines are left-justified inside the string:

"The essence of Scala:
Fusion of functional and object-oriented
programming in a typed setting."

Scala strings also support powerful string interpolation methods, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter.

BigInt and BigDecimal

When you need really large numbers, use the BigInt and BigDecimal types:

val a = BigInt(1_234_567_890_987_654_321L)
val b = BigDecimal(123_456.789)

Where Double and Float are approximate decimal numbers, BigDecimal is used for precise arithmetic, such as when working with currency.

A great thing about BigInt and BigDecimal is that they support all the operators you’re used to using with numeric types:

val b = BigInt(1234567890)   // scala.math.BigInt = 1234567890
val c = b + b                // scala.math.BigInt = 2469135780
val d = b * b                // scala.math.BigInt = 1524157875019052100

Type casting

Value types can be cast in the following way:

For example:

val b: Byte = 127
val i: Int = b  // 127

val face: Char = '☺'
val number: Int = face  // 9786

You can only cast to a type if there is no loss of information. Otherwise, you need to be explicit about the cast:

val x: Long = 987654321
val y: Float = x.toFloat  // 9.8765434E8 (note that `.toFloat` is required because the cast results in precision loss)
val z: Long = y  // Error

You can also cast a reference type to a subtype. This will be covered later in the tour.

Nothing and null

Nothing is a subtype of all types, also called the bottom type. There is no value that has the type Nothing. A common use is to signal non-termination, such as a thrown exception, program exit, or an infinite loop—i.e., it is the type of an expression which does not evaluate to a value, or a method that does not return normally.

Null is a subtype of all reference types (i.e. any subtype of AnyRef). It has a single value identified by the keyword literal null. Currently, the usage of null is considered bad practice. It should be used mostly for interoperability with other JVM languages. An opt-in compiler option changes the status of Null to fix the caveats related to its usage. This option might become the default in a future version of Scala. You can learn more about it here.

In the meantime, null should almost never be used in Scala code. Alternatives to null are discussed in the Functional Programming chapter of this book, and the API documentation.