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Kotlin Brain Teasers
book

Kotlin Brain Teasers

by Sam Cooper
October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
100 pages
2h 27m
English
Pragmatic Bookshelf
Content preview from Kotlin Brain Teasers

Discussion

The person who wrote this program has forgotten about Kotlin’s operator precedence rules, and the oversight has resulted in a bug. We can guess that the goal is to take the bonus value and add the salary to it—with 0 acting as a fallback option that would only be used if bonus was null.

Diagram of terms flowing through an expression. Two values, 'bonus' and zero, flow into the Elvis operator, which selects the bonus and ignores the zero. Next, the 'salary' and the result from the Elvis operator flow into the plus operator, which adds them to produce the final answer.

That interpretation is backed up by the names of the variables as well as by your intuitive left-to-right reading of the program, which can make the bug hard to spot. But that’s not how Kotlin interprets this code. In reality, 0 + salary is grouped together and evaluated first.

Thanks to that unintended grouping, the overall result is just the value ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798888651872Publisher Website