Operators in Scala

Built-in Operators

Scala has the following built-in operators (methods/language elements with predefined precedence rules):

Scala operators have the same meaning as in Java

Note: methods ending with : bind to the right (and right associative), so the call with list.::(value) can be written as value :: list with operator syntax. (1 :: 2 :: 3 :: Nil is the same as 1 :: (2 :: (3 :: Nil)))

Operator Overloading

In Scala you can define your own operators:

class Team {
   def +(member: Person) = ...
}

With the above defines you can use it like:

ITTeam + Jack

or

ITTeam.+(Jack)

To define unary operators you can prefix it with unary_. E.g. unary_!

class MyBigInt {
   def unary_! = ...
}

var a: MyBigInt = new MyBigInt
var b = !a

Operator Precedence

Programming in Scala gives the following outline based on the 1st character in the operator. E.g. > is the 1st character in the operator >>>:

The one exception to this rule concerns assignment operators, e.g. +=, *=, etc. If an operator ends with an equal character (=) and is not one of the comparison operators <=, >=, == or !=, then the precedence of the operator is the same as simple assignment. In other words, lower than that of any other operator.