title: Does Scala have a small number of underlying syntactic features?
body: <p>Scala is an interesting language which claims to be concise, scalable (by having many features specified in libraries rather than the compiler), and to support DSLs.
  In trying to achieve this it has lots of operators plus compiler tweaks (e.g. to support infix operators and for example : _* to flatten a sequence).</p>
  
  <p>I find the many operators (2½ pages in the 'Programming in Scala' index) and compiler tweaks confusing. To be fair many of the operators are <em>conventional</em> arithmetic/boolean operators borrowed from C et al).</p>
  
  <p>I've been told that underpinning this there are a few basic syntactic rules, I think that if I knew these it would reduce my cognitive load.</p>
  
  <p>Are there a few rules (and if so what are they) or am I doomed to have learn the many 'operator' methods and implicits in the libraries?</p>