Scala 2.8 introduces the concept of package objects. A lot of the stuff that was in Predef in 2.7 has been moved to the scala package's package object.
Questions of the form "how do I make a global alias" often have the answer: use package objects. (You can't make a truly global alias yourself, that power is reserved for the Scala developers, but you can make your own name or alias available throughout one of your packages and its subpackages, thanks to the truly nested nature of packages in Scala.)
Unfortunately there isn't a SID (Scala Improvement Document) on package objects, but some helpful links include: