Jon Pretty

Yup :) And false for `Boolean`, \u0000 for char and null for all references types Gotta love trait initialization!

Right. Primitive null.

‘Primitive null’ sounds very much like an insult to null, which I approve.

But, did you see that it's finding the implicit in B, not the one in A? You can delete the trait, extends and override and you get the same answer.

Ah, yes of course. I've minimized the example from a real case that happened at work, but it's not as minimal as I thought!

I mean, val a: Int = a is even more minimal!

Incidentally, Scala forces you to explicitly cast a literal null to a (potentially) primitive value since around Scala 2.6. If T is not known to be a subtype of AnyRef, and you give it a Null-typed thing (viz, null), you have to explicitly cast it to T.

Ah yes, I was aware of that. Does the cast resolve to a primitive value at runtime, or does it just explode? Meaning: val a: Int = null.asInstanceOf[Int]