Chapter 3

Scala's Language Support for Actors

The Scala Actors API defines a domain-specific language, hosted inside Scala, that appears to the programmer as if Scala has language-level support for actors. Scala has proven to be an especially hospitable environment for actors, in part, because of several language features that allow you to create DSL-like APIs. Scala also defines language features that, in turn, make it friendly to concurrent programming.

This chapter reviews the Scala features most relevant to actors for the Java developer who has little or no experience with Scala. If you are already familiar with Scala features such as passing functions into methods, by-name parameters, partially applied functions, and pattern matching, you can safely skip this chapter.