Welcome to our lesson on Scala's basic data types. In this lesson, we'll delve into numbers, booleans, characters, strings, and arrays. Additionally, we'll explore how we can declare these data types — either explicitly or implicitly. These fundamentals will enable you to create and manipulate data effectively in your Scala programs.

In Scala, numbers are categorized by their memory sizes and value ranges. Integral numbers such as Int and Long require 4 bytes and 8 bytes of memory, respectively. For numbers with decimal points, we have Float and Double. The Float type requires 4 bytes of memory and supports approximately seven decimal places, while Double requires 8 bytes of memory and can handle around 15 decimal places.

Here's an example illustrating the different number types:

Starting with Scala 2.13, you can use underscores to make large numbers more readable:

The Boolean data type represents truth values as true or false. The Char data type, represented by Char, holds a single character, while String stores sequences of characters. It's important to note that Chars are defined using single quotes ('), and Strings are defined using double quotes (").

In Scala, you can explicitly declare data types by specifying the type after the variable name. Although type inference is available, it is not applicable for long numbers, so you always have to specify Long explicitly:

For example:

We have covered the basics of data types in Scala, delving into numbers, booleans, characters, and strings. We have also explored explicit and implicit type declarations. As the next step, look forward to exciting practice exercises that will solidify your understanding and offer practical exposure. Let's delve deeper into Scala!