What is the purpose of the scala.tools.nsc package?

Question

I've spent a good few hours googling for something to allow me to open Zip files in Scala (I know you can just use the Java API, but I was hoping to find a Scala friendly wrapper for it instead of faffing about writing Buffered/FileInputstream and so on)

So I was just messing about in the REPL and found this package

scala.tools.nsc.io.ZipArchive

Which after some digging and using this scala.tools.nsc.io.File, I managed to open a zip archive with all of the Scala niceness (being able to foreach etc)

The thing is I can't see any mention of this package in the official Scala 2.8.1 API document, so I was just wondering why there's no documentation on it? What is it?

Answer 1

this package contains Compiler-related classes. It's mainly used (as far as I know) for Plugin creation.

Due to it being related to Scala compiler, I'm not sure to which point it is a "stable" package and how much may it change between Scala versions, so be careful there.