Packages and Imports

When we changed our code to compile we had to add many import statements to it. In this section we learn about them.

We've seen that one name can shadow another. This can cause problems in larger programs as many parts of a program may want to put a common name to different uses. We can create scopes to hide names from the outside, but we must still deal with names defined at the top-level.

We have the same problem in natural language. For example, if both your brother and friend were called "Ziggy" you would have to qualify which one you meant when you used their name. Perhaps you could tell from context, or perhaps your friend was "Ziggy S" and your brother was just "Ziggy".

In Scala we can use packages to organise names. A package creates a scope for names defined at the top-level. All top-level names within the same package are defined in the same scope. To bring names in a package into another scope we must import them.

Creating a package is simple: we write

package <name>

at the top of the file, replacing <name> with the name of our package.

You can't define packages in a worksheet. To get the following code to work you must put the code within the package example into a file and compile it.

When we want to use names defined in a package we use an import statement, specifying the package name followed by * for all names, or the just the name we want if we only want one or a few names.

Here's an example.

Let's start by defining some names within a package.

package example

object One {
  val one = 1
}

object Two {
  val two = 2
}

object Three {
  val three = 3
}

Now to bring these names into scope in a different file we must import them. We could import just one name.

import example.One

One.one

Or both One and Two.

import example.{One, Two}

One.one + Two.two

Or all the names in example.

import example.*

One.one + Two.two + Three.three

In Scala we can also import just about anything that defines a scope, including objects. So the following code brings one into scope.

import example.One.*

one

Import Syntax

To import names from a package we use the following syntax:

import <package>.*, imports all the names in the package. This is known as a wildcard import.
import <package>._ is the Scala 2 syntax for a wildcard import.
import <package>.<name> to import just one name.
import <package>.{<name1>, <name2>, ...} to import more than one name.

Package Organisation

Packages stop top-level names from colliding, but what about collisions between package names? It's common to organise packages in a hierarchy, which helps to avoid collisions. For example, in Doodle the package core is defined within the package doodle. When we use the statement

import doodle.core.*

we're indicating we want the package core within the package doodle, and not some other package that might be called core.

To define such a package we use the syntax

package doodle.core

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