Data Types

As the name suggests, data-type specifies the type of the data present in the variable.

Scala supports all types of data types available in Java. Some of the most commonly used data types are as follows:

Data type	Description	Range	Size
int	used to store whole numbers	-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647	4 bytes
short	used to store whole numbers	-32,768 to 32,767	2 bytes
long	used to store whole numbers	-9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807	8 bytes
byte	used to store whole numbers	-128 to 127	1 byte
float	used to store fractional numbers	6 to 7 decimal digits	4 bytes
double	used to store fractional numbers	15 decimal digits	8 bytes
boolean	can either store true or false	either true or false	1 bit
char	used to store a single character	one character	2 bytes
string	used to store strings	sequence of characters	2bytes per character

Literals

Literals/constants are used to represent fixed values which can't be altered later in the code.

1. Integer literals

Interger literals are numeric literals. Below are the examples of various types of literals

79         // decimal (base 10) 
0253       // octal (base 8)
0x4F       // hexadecimal (base 16)
22         // int
53u        // unsigned int
79l        // long
7953ul       // unsigned long

2. Float point literals

Float point literals are also numeric literals but has either a fractional form or an exponent form.

79.22         // valid
79.2539f        // valid
53e          // not valid as it is incomplete exponent
1.0e22          // valid

3. Boolean literals

There are two Boolean literals:

true value representing true.
false value representing false

4. Character literals

Character literals are represented with in single quotes. For example, 'a', '1' etc. A character literal can be a simple character (e.g., 'a'), an escape sequence (e.g., '\n'), or a universal character (e.g., '\u02C0').

Escape sequence	Description
\n	New line
\r	Carriage Return
?	Question mark
\t	Horizontal tab
\v	Vertical tab
\f	Form feed
\	Backslash
'	Single quotation
"	Double quotation
\0	Null character
?	? Question mark
\b	Back space
\a	alert or bell

5. String literals

String literals are represented with in double quotes. String literals contains series of characters which can be plain characters, escape sequence or a universal character.

"Hello World"