Scala - Parentheses and Curly Brackets in Anonymous Functions

Scala gives a lot of flexibility in defining anonymous functions, and that might lead to a confussion. Jacek Laskowski asked an interesting question on stackoverflow.com regarding of calling a map method on collection. To summarize it (given a list lst):

Why lst map {c:Char => 1} and lst map ((c:Char) => 1) work fine, but lst map (c:Char => 1) gives us compilation error:

 error: identifier expected but integer literal found.
       lst map (c:Char => 1)

To answer this question we should look into Scala Language Specification, into part 6.23 Anonymous Functions.There is a description how anonymous function can be defined:

Expr ::= (Bindings | [‘implicit’] id | ‘_’) ‘=>’ Expr
ResultExpr ::= (Bindings | ([‘implicit’] id | ‘_’) ‘:’ CompoundType) ‘=>’ Block
Bindings ::= ‘(’ Binding {‘,’ Binding} ‘)’
Binding ::= (id | ‘_’) [‘:’ Type]

As you can see Bindings requires to be placed inside two surrounding parentheses. So if anonymous function defines the type of the parameter, as in our example, it has to be defined in this way:

(c:Char) => 1

And the call to map should look like that:

lst map((c:Char) => 1)

Also in the same part of reference documentation we can find:

If an anonymous function (x: T) => e with a single typed parameter appears as the result expression of a block, it can be abbreviated to x: T => e. 

So if anonymous function is defied as last expression in a code block, and has exacly one parameter, you can use abbreviated syntax, without parenthesis around c:Char, to define anonymous function. So, in our example, we can write c:Char => 1, but only when we place it inside a code block {c:Char => 1}. And we can call map function this way:

lst map({c:Char => 1})

or with abbreviated syntax without parenthesis:

lst map {c:Char => 1}

And that explains main question why lst map {c:Char => 1} is legal, and lst map (c:Char => 1) is not.

This is summarized in changelog at the end of the documentation (Changes in Version 2.1.7 (19-Jul-2006)):

Closure Syntax

The syntax of closures has been slightly restricted (§6.23). The form

x: T => E

is valid only when enclosed in braces, i.e. { x: T => E }. The following is illegal, because it might be read as the value x typed with the type T => E:

val f = x: T => E

Legal alternatives are:

val f = { x: T => E }
val f = (x: T) => E

Another way to specify anonymous functions:

If we look closer at specification we can see that it allows us to use another way to define anonymous function:

Expr ::= (Bindings | [‘implicit’] id | ‘_’) ‘=>’ Expr

We can see that we can define your anonymous function without parameter binding in those two ways (if we don't need to specify argument type):

lst map (c => 1)
// or
lst map (_ => 1)

I hope that this article clarified how we can declare anonymous functions and it shouldn't cause a confusion any more.

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