Singleton values should belong to Identity, that way they’d be a part of Traversable, Foldable, Functor, Monad, etc. Scala kind-of allows this, but not completely implicitly:

// Following works!
val three: Id[Int] = 3
three.map(_ + 1)

// Sadly this doesn't:
3.map(_ + 1)

from what I understand, R does just that without any macroscopic issue

> a <- 1
> b <- c(1,2,3)
> class(a)
[1] "numeric"
> class(b)
[1] "numeric"
> a+b
[1] 2 3 4
> sum(a)
[1] 1
> sum(b)
[1] 6
> for(e in a) print(e)
[1] 1
> for(e in b) print(e)
[1] 1
[1] 2
[1] 3