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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

Referential equality and structural equality

When working with a language that supports object-oriented programming (OOP), there are two concepts of equality. The first is when two separate references point to the exact same instance in memory. The second is when two objects are separate instances in memory but have the same value. What the same value means is specified by the developer of the class. For example, for two square instances to be the same, we might just require they have the same length and width regardless of coordinates.

The former is called referential equality. To test whether two references point to the same instance, we use the === operator (triple equals) or !== for negation:

    val a = File("/mobydick.doc") 
    val b = File("/mobydick.doc") 
    val sameRef = a === b 

The value of the test a === b is false because, although a and b reference...

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