Difference between method and function in Scala

Question

I read Scala Functions (part of Another tour of Scala). In that post he stated:

Methods and functions are not the same thing

Answer 1

There is a nice article here from which most of my descriptions are taken. Just a short comparison of Functions and Methods regarding my understanding. Hope it helps:

Functions: They are basically an object. More precisely, functions are objects with an apply method; Therefore, they are a little bit slower than methods because of their overhead. It is similar to static methods in the sense that they are independent of an object to be invoked. A simple example of a function is just like bellow:

val f1 = (x: Int) => x + x
f1(2)  // 4

The line above is nothing except assigning one object to another like object1 = object2. Actually the object2 in our example is an anonymous function and the left side gets the type of an object because of that. Therefore, now f1 is an object(Function). The anonymous function is actually an instance of Function1[Int, Int] that means a function with 1 parameter of type Int and return value of type Int. Calling f1 without the arguments will give us the signature of the anonymous function (Int => Int = )

Methods: They are not objects but assigned to an instance of a class,i.e., an object. Exactly the same as method in java or member functions in c++ (as Raffi Khatchadourian pointed out in a comment to this question) and etc. A simple example of a method is just like bellow:

def m1(x: Int) = x + x
m1(2)  // 4

The line above is not a simple value assignment but a definition of a method. When you invoke this method with the value 2 like the second line, the x is substituted with 2 and the result will be calculated and you get 4 as an output. Here you will get an error if just simply write m1 because it is method and need the input value. By using _ you can assign a method to a function like bellow:

val f2 = m1 _  // Int => Int =