Syntactic sugar

In the spirit of making Scala scalable from scripts up to systems, Scala contains some syntactic sugar to make scripting and internal DSLs a bit easier to write. For example there are several situations where the '.' and '()' for method calls are optional. Semi-colons are optional (except for single-line statements).

There are some corner cases but the basic rule is that you need an odd number of arguments if you wish leave out the '.'.
Examples:

1. scala> "hello" substring (1,3)
2. res0: java.lang.String = el
4. scala> "hello" substring 1
5. res1: java.lang.String = ello
7. scala> 1 toString ()
8. res2: java.lang.String = 1

Precendence runs left to right so:

1. "hello" contains "hello world" toString ()

becomes

1. "hello".contains("hello world").toString()

Another example:

1. scala> "hello" contains "hello world" toString () substring 4
2. res6: java.lang.String = e
4. scala> "hello".contains("hello world").toString().substring(4)
5. res7: java.lang.String = e

There is some operator precendence which we will cover later. Operator precedence allows statements like the following:

1. scala> "hello" substring 6 - 4
2. res8: java.lang.String = llo
4. scala> "hello" substring  (6 - 4)
5. res9: java.lang.String = llo
7. scala> "hello".substring  (6 - 4)
8. res10: java.lang.String = llo