Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

Tuples

Scala tuples are used to combine a fixed number of items together. The ultimate target of this grouping is to help in the anonymous function and so that they can be passed around as a whole. The real difference with an array or list is that a tuple can hold objects of different types while maintaining the information of the type of each element, while a collection doesn't and uses, as the type, the common type (for instance, in the previous example, the type of that set would be Set[Any]).

From the computational point of view, Scala tuples are also immutable. In other words, Tuples do use a classes to store elements (for example, Tuple2, Tuple3, Tuple22, and so on).

The following is an example of a tuple holding an integer, a string, ...