What are Generic Classes in Scala?

Generic Classes are classes that take a type – just like a parameter – inside the square brackets[].

This type of class is useful for collection classes.

Naming convensions

Generic classes in Scala have particular naming conventions when implementing a class.

  • Letter A is written inside [] as a type parameter
  • Symbol used to denote a key is A and for a value, it is B
  • Symbol used to denote a numeric value is N

Syntax

class MyList[A] {
    // Some methods or objects.
}

Code

Let’s look at the implementation of Generic Classes through the following example:

object GenericClass {
	def main(args: Array[String]) : Unit = {
		abstract class Addition[A] {
			def addition(b: A, c: A): A
		}
		
		class intAddition extends Addition[Int] {
			def addition(b: Int, c: Int): Int = b + c
		}
		class doubleAddition extends Addition[Double] {
      
			def addition(b : Double, c : Double) : Double = b + c
		}
		val add1 = new intAddition().addition(69, 5)
		val add2 = new doubleAddition().addition(30.0, 8.0)
		println(add1)
		println(add2)
	
	}
}

Explanation

The above code snippet implements a Generic Class, demonstrating how we can use the same function (i.e., addition()) in multiple classes to add distinct data types and display their respective results.

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