[DavidMcLaughlin]

> One is dotfree and uses braces. One uses a dot. And one is dotfree and uses parens. I feel like it would be a lot better if there were only one way to do this.

I don't disagree with the principal of your complaint, coming from working with Perl I know of the potential horrors of having such flexibility.

But just to explain why you can have both braces and parens here. In Scala, if you have a single parameter to a function, you can use braces. This is to allow you to create your own DSLs and control structures. The standard example is:

    def withPrinter(file: File)(op: PrintWriter => Unit) {
      val writer = new FileWriter(file)
      try {
        op(file)
      } finally {
        writer.close()
      }
    }

Which for these types of blog posts we could call as:

    withWriter(new File("test.txt"))(_.println("test"))

But in real applications where function bodies might be more complex, then you can have control abstractions like this:

    withWriter(new File("test.txt")) {
      writer => writer.println("test")
    }

So used in a tasteful and sensible way, it's a really nice feature.