Scala Language Symbol Literals
Remarks
Scala comes with a concept of symbols - strings that are interned, that is: two symbols with the same name (the same character sequence), in contrary to strings, will refer to the same object during execution.
Symbols are a feature of many languages: Lisp, Ruby and Erlang and more, however in Scala they are of relatively small use. Good feature to have nevertheless.
Use:
Any literal beginning with a single quote ', followed by one or more digits, letters, or under‐scores _ is a symbol literal. The first character is an exception as it can’t be a digit.
Good definitions:
'ATM
'IPv4
'IPv6
'map_to_operations
'data_format_2006
// Using the `Symbol.apply` method
Symbol("hakuna matata")
Symbol("To be or not to be that is a question")
Bad definitions:
'8'th_division
'94_pattern
'bad-format
