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Scala syntax - pass string to object

While playing around with regexps in Scala I wrote something like this:

scala> val y = "Foo"
y: java.lang.String = Foo

scala> y "Bar"

scala>

As you can see, the second statement is just silently accepted. Is this legal a legal statement, and if so, what does it do? Or is it a bug in the parser and there should be an error message?

Solution

  • This is indeed an error in the parser. It is fixed in scala 2.7.2 (which is RC6 at the moment)

    $ ./scala
Welcome to Scala version 2.7.2.RC6 (Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM, Java 1.5.0_16).
Type in expressions to have them evaluated.
Type :help for more information.
scala> def y = "foo"
y: java.lang.String

scala> y "bar"
<console>:1: error: ';' expected but string literal found.
       y "bar"
         ^

scala> val x = "foo"
x: java.lang.String = foo

scala> x "foo"
<console>:1: error: ';' expected but string literal found.
       x "foo"
         ^

scala> "foo" "bar"
<console>:1: error: ';' expected but string literal found.
       "foo" "bar"
             ^