What is scala.mobile supposed to accomplish?

...and why has the package this misleading name (I assumed it had something to do with JavaME or mobile/smart phones)?

I found no references on the internet about scala.mobile.Code or scala.mobile.Location at all nor did I manage to do anything with those classes except getting ClassCastExcetions or NoSuchMethodErrors.

Actually there is not even a single test against scala.mobile in the Scala's test tree which could help understanding that code.

The classes really smell like they were forgotten in the source tree a long time ago and got accidentally released since that.

Maybe I just missed something about them?

U开发者_C百科pdate: scala.mobile was removed in Scala 2.9.

I just checked the source code.

When Scala changed the name mangling of class files a few years ago and it seems people forgot to update these classes accordingly.

So my answer would be:

At least Location has no purpose, because it is not possible to get anything sensible out of it (except exceptions) and Code without Location is severely limited. It works though if you pass the class literal to Code directly:

import scala.mobile._

val c = new Code(classOf[scala.collection.mutable.StringBuilder])
c.apply[StringBuilder, String]("append")("Foo")
c.apply[String]("toString")()    // returns "Foo"
c.apply[Int]("length")()         // returns 3

Looks like yet-another implementation in the standard library of reflection-slightly-nicer.

The description of Location pretty much explains what that is about:

The class Location provides a create method to instantiate objects from a network location by specifying the URL address of the jar/class file.

It might be used by remote actors. Maybe.

As for why it has this misleading name? Well, back in 2004 smart phones had really low penetration, so maybe the association wasn't all that strong.