One surprising thing about Scala is that the body of a Scala class is itself a constructor. However, Scala does so; in fact, in a more explicit way. After that, a new instance of that class is created and executed. Moreover, you can specify the arguments of the constructor in the class declaration line.

Consequently, the constructor arguments are accessible from all of the methods defined in that class. For example, the following class and constructor definition is valid in Scala:

class Hello(name: String) {
  // Statement executed as part of the constructor
  println("New instance with name: " + name)
  // Method which accesses the constructor argument
  def sayHello = println("Hello, " + name + "!")
}

The equivalent Java class would look like this:

public class Hello {
  private final String name;
  public Hello(String name) {
    System.out.println("New instance with name: " + name);
    this.name = name;
  }
  public void sayHello() {
    System.out.println("Hello, " + name + "!");
  }
}