Methods

We've already seen Scala methods and used them many times so far. However, to differentiate between methods and functions, we'll take a look at the Scala methods once again. What are methods in Scala? Throughout our discussion of methods, we'll look at several definitions of what a method is. Let's start with what a method may contain:

Method signature

As you can see, we start our method with a few modifiers such as annotations, or keywords such as final and so on. This is followed by a def keyword, method name, parameter list, and then a return type that is optional. Scala methods are intelligent enough to infer the return type. Usually, a return type for a method is what the last expression evaluates to. Check out the following example:

object Methods { 
 
  def filePrinter() = { 
    println("Version 0") 
    val filesHere = (new File(".")).listFiles() 
    for(file <- filesHere) 
      println(file) 
  } 
 
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = { 
    filePrinter() 
  } 
 ...