Keywords vs API, continued

Przekonany postem Jeffa Atwooda (którego mimo wszystko jeszcze czytam :P) postanowiłem, że decyzją pragmatyczną będzie zmiana języka bloga na 'informatyczne esperanto' czyli angielski. Z dniem dzisiejszym wszystkie posty będą ukazywały się w tymże języku.
-- Translation --
Jeff Atwood (whose blog I continued to read in spite of everything :P) convinced me in his latest post that it'd be a pragmatic decision to switch the langugage of posts to 'Esperanto of software world', ie. English. Therefore starting today all posts are written in English.



Here we go then!

In one of the older posts I mentioned that it may be quite a problem to migrate from Scala to Java world. The keywords chosen for Scala might have been used already for name of the methods or classes in existing Java APIs (e.g. 'match' or 'yield') thus preventing us from using them in our code. BTW the well known example of such a case is Java evolution itself (1.4 -> 1.5 and the appearance of 'enum' keyword')

It appears that in Scala nothing is impossible! Well it is not feasible to define/use functions as presented below:

def match() = "Hello world! I am a 'match'!"
def yield() = "Hello world! I am a 'yield'!"

match()
yield()

Yet nothing prevents us from doing it this way:

def `match`() = "Hello world! I am a 'match'!"
def `yield`() = "Hello world! I am a 'yield'!"

`match`()
`yield`()

It is incredibly useful not only for Scala adoption among Java developers but also quite helpful during the development of 'Scala greenfield projects'. While in Java it is not that big issue (due to relatively small number of keywords) in Scala it'd have probably started being a bit of pain in the ass (with keywords like 'val' or 'match').

The conclusion? Scala rox! :D