What are the biggest differences between Scala 2.8 and Scala 2.7?

Question

I\'ve written a rather large program in Scala 2.7.5, and now I\'m looking forward to version 2.8. But I\'m curious about how this big leap in the evolution of Scala will aff

Answer 1

You can find here a preview of new feature in Scala2.8 (April 2009), completed with recent this article (June 2009)

• Named and Default Arguments
• Nested Annotations
• Package Objects
• @specialized
• Improved Collections (some rewrite might be needed here)
• REPL will have command completion (more on that and other tricks in this article)
• New Control Abstractions (continuation or break)
• Enhancements (Swing wrapper, performances, ...)

"Rewriting code" is not an obligation (except for using some of the improved Collections), but some features like continuation (Wikipedia: an abstract representation of the control state, or the "rest of computation" or "rest of code to be executed") can give you some new ideas. A good introduction is found here, written by Daniel (who has also posted a much more detailed and specific answer in this thread).

Note: Scala on Netbeans seems to work with some 2.8 nightly-build (vs. the official page for 2.7.x)