Implicit conversion, import required or not?

Question

I write

object MyString {
  implicit def stringToMyString(s: String) = new MyString(s)    
}

class MyString(str: String) {
  def camelize = str.split("_").map(_.capitalize).mkString

  override def toString = str
}


object Parse {
  def main(args: Array[String]) {
    val x = "active_record".camelize
    // ...
  }
}

in my program. This causes a compiling error. After I inserted

  import MyString.stringToMyString

Then it works.

From Odersky's Programming in Scala I got that implicit conversion in the companion object of the source or expected target types don't need to be imported.

Answer 1

implicit conversion in the companion object of the source or expected target types don't need to be imported.

True enough. Now, the method camelize is defined on the class MyString, and, indeed, there is an implicit conversion to MyString inside its object companion. However, there is nothing in the code telling the compiler that MyString is the expected target type.

If, instead, you wrote this:

val x = ("active_record": MyString).camelize

then it would work, because the compiler would know you expect "active_record" to be a MyString, making it look up the implicit conversion inside object MyString.

This might look a bit restrictive, but it actually works in a number of places. Say, for instance, you had:

class Fraction(num: Int, denom: Int) {
    ...
    def +(b: Fraction) = ...
    ...
}

And then you had a code like this:

val x: Fraction = ...
val y = x + 5

Now, x does have a + method, whose expected type is Fraction. So the compiler would look, here, for an implicit conversion from Int to Fraction inside the object Fraction (and inside the object Int, if there was one, since that's the source type).