Is it possible to add a custom link group to update-alternatives that is not already there by default?

For example, I want to add Scala and all its supporting binaries as a link group 'scala'. I'm trying using this script, but keep getting the error:

update-alternatives: error: unknown argument `'

I'm not sure what that means, but after troubleshooting the script a bit with no luck, I'm wondering if update-alternatives has a hard-coded list of link groups, that can't be added to, and that doesn't include scala.