Introduction
This article is part of the Scala knowledge bits Series.
Periodically, I will publish new exercises so you can slowly build up knowledge about Scala.
It is designed to be done in a very short amount of time and learn a little bit each day, just to create a routine.
This episode will teach you about Scala literal identifiers.
Hope you are going to enjoy it! It is designed for anyone to learn Scala from scratch and slowly learn, one Bit at a time.
After this Bit, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments down below.
Feel free to join the Discord server as well if you would like some help and support from the rest of our community.
What are we learning today?
Today we are going to learn about Scala literal identifiers !
Super short one today.
But I think it is necessary to know in case you encounter it in the wild
Time to try on the exercise on your own and scroll down for more information when you are done or if you are stuck.
Exercise
Here is an exercise to complete today.
If I did my job well, you should be able to guess by yourself the solution based on what you previously learned and based on the clues.
But if you get stuck, scroll down to get more information.
The goal of the exercise is to replace the ??? by a piece of code so that the exercise compiles and that’s how you win! Good luck!
You can fill the exercise right in here:
Or, if it does not load, go on to Scastie (PpMpUMxaSQyPHkYRKmbRIw).
More information about Scala literal identifiers
In this exercise you will learn (or have learned, if you have already solved the puzzle) about Scala literal identifiers.
So yes, super short today like I said.
It is possible in Scala to have weird value name that can be sentences. Or pretty much anything for that matter. You can even try to create a value named \n and it works.
The syntax is straightforward, just have to start and end the name of the identifier by ` backquote.
It also works for field names in a case class for instance.
One use case where I have this used pretty often is with giter8. This is a system to create project template. You can learn more on their GitHub. In those template, user can enter any input they want so i can be useful to keep the user input inside the ` so the rest of the template do not break.
Another use case is to be able to use reserved keyword, for instance if you would like to name your value type that wouldn’t work, but you can name it `type`.
Feel free to go back to the exercise, modify the code to try out new things and get a better intuition for Scala literal identifiers.
Conclusion
I hope you have learned something new or had fun during this Scala Knowledge Bit.
Please ask questions or post feedback in the comments below.
Feel free to try on the next Scala Knowledege Bit.
If you are curious about the previous Scala knowledge Bits, go check it out! 🙂