Welcome back! In today's lecture, we will delve into a critical concept within Scala: Primitive Data Type Conversion.

In software development, there can be scenarios where you need to manipulate data received in one format, typically from user inputs, and store or process it in a different format. For such occasions, it is essential to understand how to convert data types within Scala efficiently and safely.

By the end of this lesson, you will have learned the tools and techniques Scala provides for data type conversion. Additionally, you'll be able to perform these conversions safely while handling common errors efficiently. Let's get started!

Variables are used for storing and manipulating data in programming. Each variable has a specific data type that determines the kind of values it can hold. Sometimes, we need to move data across different types, and that's when data type conversion becomes essential.

Data type conversion, also known as typecasting, is the method of converting an entity from one data type to another.

Scala offers two broad categories of data type conversion:

• Implicit Conversion: Scala automatically performs this type of conversion when a smaller type is assigned to a more sizeable type size, albeit with a few exceptions.

• Explicit Conversion: As the name suggests, this type of conversion requires manual intervention and is frequently used when converting a larger data type to a smaller one.

Here's an example:

In this example, we declare a variable myNumber of type Int and value 5. We then explicitly convert it to a Double, resulting in . This illustrates explicit type casting in Scala.