Kotlin Tour

Functions

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#function-declarations

Kotlin makes programming fun again so naturally the fun keyword is used to declare a function 😀.

If we only have one return statement we can transform the function to use only an expression.

We could go one step further and remove the return type as the compiler will be nice enough to infer it for us.

Note: inferring the return type works only for single expression function, the compiler won't try to infer it for functions with block body so overuse single expression function 😁.

If a function doesn't return anything we use the Unit type :

Named arguments

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#named-arguments

When calling a function we can change arguments order by naming them in the call :

fun sub(a: Int, b: Int) = a - b

print(sub(b = 1, a = 2))        // 1

Default arguments

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#default-arguments

Never dreamt of assigning default values to some arguments instead of having to define multiple overloading functions ? Guess what ? You can 😀 :

Tip : use @JvmOverloads to generate overloading methods for Java code.

Local Functions

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#local-functions

You can declare local functions, having access to outer scope :

Extensions

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/extensions.html

It is possible to extend existing classes with new functionalities, even existing JVM classes.
We just need to prefix the function name with the receiver type, followed by .. The receiver will be accessible as this in the function.

Infix notation

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#infix-notation

Using infix keyword and extension functions we can use infix notation for some of our functions :

Vararg

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#variable-number-of-arguments-varargs

As in Java we might need to pass a variable number of arguments. In this case we need to prefix the argument by the keyword vararg :

Operator Overloading

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/operator-overloading.html

At last we can overload common operators using the operator keyword 😃 :

Tail recursion

https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#tail-recursive-functions

A tail recursive function can be marked as such with the tailrec keyword.

Beware: contrary to Scala the compiler won't raise an error if you incorrectly marked a function as tail recursive.