For that matter, it's an incredibly anachronistic and inaccurate usage of systems programming. People generally reserve systems programming to problems that in order to be solved require something closer to gluing toothpicks than spraying memory.

On topic then, this is the first time I see Scala syntax and was somewhat pleasantly surprised (the only languages I really know are JavaScript and Python).

On slide http://monkey.org/~marius/talks/twittersystems/#16:

    case class Stock(ticker: String, price: Double) { 
      def <(other: Stock) = price < other.price
    }

    val goog = Stock("GOOG", 675.15)
    val aapl = Stock("AAPL", 604.00)

    aapl < goog == true
    goog < aapl == false

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that the class Stock gets a method called "<". So appl.< google (or the other way around) would also work. The previous slide also shows this, but the Stock example is makes it even clearer that "Scala is a pure object oriented language: every value is an object." appl and goog are objects, of type Stock, and < is an object, a method of Stock.

I wonder if this kind of method would work

    def ==(other: Stock) = price != other.price

and what would happen if it was like this

    def ==(other: Stock) = self != other

(where self would be a reference to the Stock instance, ala python, or this in javascript)

and it was invoked like this

    appl == goog

and return true