A list of special characters in Scala with their definitions

Is there a reference I can look at to learn about special symbols in Scala? The famous one being _ . The reason behind this is that, I want to grow my knowledge about Scala, and I think this would be the first step. This is one in this link but looks like more lexical description; which is more on the language design side than explaining special characters (if Im wrong here please point it out :-).

Scala intentionally has relatively few such special symbols. In most languages, operators such as + and * are special – in Scala, they’re just symbols that you can use as function names. (In Scala 3 there may be some subtle differences between those and alphanumeric function names, but that’s mostly in the details of how you are allowed to use them.)

There are a few symbols that are special in certain places – for example, if you end a function name with :, that means that this function is right-associative. (That is, when used as an infix operator, it applies to the value to the right, with the one to the left as its parameter.)

But broadly speaking, Scala doesn’t have a huge list of “special symbols”, the way many languages do. There are a few reserved symbols, listed on the page you point to; their uses are generally described in context where they are relevant, rather than in one place. (Frankly, it’s difficult to learn what a symbol such as <: means out of that context – they’re specialized for particular situations, and don’t make sense until you have learned that particular aspect of the language.) Feel free to ask here about any particular symbol, but I don’t think there is a page that is focused on listing them, because they wouldn’t make a lot of sense that way.

Also, note that the spec you’re pointing to is rather old. The current one, for Scala 2.13 (recently released), can be found here. It’s mostly similar, but there are some subtle differences…