Kotlin in Action

Chapter 7. Operator overloading and other conventions

This chapter covers

• Operator overloading
• Conventions: special-named functions supporting various operations
• Delegated properties

As you know, Java has several language features tied to specific classes in the standard library. For example, objects that implement java.lang.Iterable can be used in for loops, and objects that implement java.lang.AutoCloseable can be used in try-with-resources statements.

Kotlin has a number of features that work in a similar way, where specific language constructs are implemented by calling functions that you define in your own code. But instead of being tied to specific types, in Kotlin those features are tied to functions with specific names. For example, ...