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Learn Kotlin Programming

You're reading from   Learn Kotlin Programming A comprehensive guide to OOP, functions, concurrency, and coroutines in Kotlin 1.3

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Product type Paperback
Published in May 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789802351
Length 514 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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Stefan Bocutiu Stefan Bocutiu
Author Profile Icon Stefan Bocutiu
Stefan Bocutiu
Stephen Samuel Stephen Samuel
Author Profile Icon Stephen Samuel
Stephen Samuel
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Toc

Table of Contents (21) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Fundamental Concepts in Kotlin FREE CHAPTER
2. Getting Started with Kotlin 3. Kotlin Basics 4. Object-Oriented Programming in Kotlin 5. Section 2: Practical Concepts in Kotlin
6. Functions in Kotlin 7. Higher-Order Functions and Functional Programming 8. Properties 9. Null Safety, Reflection, and Annotations 10. Generics 11. Data Classes 12. Collections 13. Testing in Kotlin 14. Microservices with Kotlin 15. Section 3: Advanced Concepts in Kotlin
16. Concurrency 17. Coroutines 18. Application of Coroutines 19. Kotlin Serialization 20. Other Books You May Enjoy

Parameterized functions

Consider a function called random() that, when given some elements, returns one element randomly. We don't need to know what the types of the elements are when we write this function, as we will not be using the elements ourselves. We just need to be able to select one to return. When we use a type in this way—abstracting over the type, we use the term type parameter. So, our random function would have a single type parameter: the type of the elements we are selecting from.

If we want to write a generic function, such as the random function just mentioned, we might decide to start with something such as the following:

    fun random(one: Any, two: Any, three: Any): Any 

This would work as we can pass in any instances we choose. However, no matter what types we choose to pass in as arguments, our returned type would be inferred as Any. We&apos...

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