The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Destructuring
Written by Mike James   
Tuesday, 15 February 2022
Article Index
The Programmers Guide To Kotlin - Destructuring
The Spread Operator

The Spread Operator

There is one special type of destructuring designed to make it easier to use varargs. If you pass parameters to a vararg one by one it builds an array for you to hold them. What if you already have the arguments in an array? This is where the spread operator, * comes in. It allows you to pass an array directly to the varargs as an array. You can think of it as unpacking the array into separate parameters, which is why it can be regarded as a destructuring operator. For example:

val a=arrayOf(1,2,3)
val list =asList(*a)

The asList method expects a vararg of the individual elements that will be used to create the list. The spread operator passes the array as if it was a set of individual parameters.

 

Summary

  • Kotlin doesn’t provide structs or any value alternative to classes, but it does provide a data class which has data properties and a set of methods to work with them.

  • Equality is a difficult thing to define in an object-oriented world. There are two basic equality operators == for equality of reference and === for structural or content equality.

  • If you want equality to be correctly interpreted for your custom classes you need to implement your own equals method. This can either perform a shallow or a deep comparison.

  • Arrays have a referential definition of equals, but you can also use contentEquals for a shallow structural equals and contentDeepEquals for a deep structural equals.

  • The data classes, List, Map and Set have a generated shallow equals.

  • Enums allow you to construct ordinal data representations that map names to integers. An enum behaves like a static class that has properties that are instances of the same type.

  • An enum can have properties and methods, but these are shared between all instances of the type.

  • Sealed classes provide an alternative to enum, but you have to do more work to implement similar behavior. They work like a set of derived classes that form a known set. The compiler will check that you have included them all in a when expression.

  • Delegation is an alternative to inheritance and you can automatically delegate property implementation to a specific object that implements a delegated interface.

  • Destructuring is a simple mechanism for unpacking the data contained in a structure into individual variables.

  • The spread operator * allows you to pass an array to a vararg parameter.

This article is an extract from: 

Programmer's Guide To Kotlin Second Edition

kotlin2e360

You can buy it from: Amazon

Contents

  1. What makes Kotlin Special
  2. The Basics:Variables,Primitive Types and Functions 
  3. Control
         Extract: If and When 
  4. Strings and Arrays
  5. The Class & The Object
  6. Inheritance
  7. The Type Hierarchy
  8. Generics
  9. Collections, Iterators, Sequences & Ranges
        Extract: Iterators & Sequences 
  10. Advanced functions 
  11. Anonymous, Lamdas & Inline Functions
  12. Data classes, enums and destructuring
        Extract: Destructuring 
  13. Exceptions, Annotations & Reflection
  14. Coroutines
        Extract: Coroutines 
  15. Working with Java
        Extract: Using Swing ***NEW!

<ASIN:B096MZY7JM>

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Banner


Opaque Systems Introduces Gateway GenAI Solution
14/03/2024

Opaque Systems has announced an early access program for Opaque Gateway, software designed to address data privacy, security, and sovereignty concerns in managing GenAI implementations.



100 Episodes of 5mins of Postgres
08/03/2024

The popular PostgreSQL explainer series is celebrating its 100th release and beyond. Let's take a look at what it makes it so special.


More News

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

<ASIN:1871962536>

<ASIN:1871962544>



Last Updated ( Tuesday, 15 February 2022 )