What is the formal difference in Scala between braces and parentheses, and when should they be used?

Question

What is the formal difference between passing arguments to functions in parentheses () and in braces {}?

The feeling I got from the Pro

Answer 1

Increased compile checking with parens

The authors of Spray, recommend that round parens give increased compile checking. This is especially important for DSLs like Spray. By using parens you are telling the compiler that it should only be given a single line, therefore if you accidentally gave it two or more, it will complain. Now this isn't the case with curly braces, if for example, you forget an operator somewhere your code will compile, you get unexpected results and potentially a very hard bug to find. Below is contrived (since the expressions are pure and will at least give a warning), but makes the point

method {
  1 +
  2
  3
}

method(
  1 +
  2
  3
 )

The first compiles, the second gives error: ')' expected but integer literal found. the author wanted to write 1 + 2 + 3.

One could argue it's similar for multi-parameter methods with default arguments; it's impossible to accidentally forget a comma to separate parameters when using parens.

Verbosity

An important often overlooked note about verbosity. Using curly braces inevitably leads to verbose code since the scala style guide clearly states that closing curly braces must be on their own line: http://docs.scala-lang.org/style/declarations.html "... the closing brace is on its own line immediately following the last line of the function." Many auto-reformatters, like in Intellij, will automatically perform this reformatting for you. So try to stick to using round parens when you can. E.g. List(1, 2, 3).reduceLeft{_ + _} becomes:

List(1, 2, 3).reduceLeft {
  _ + _
}