Programming Kotlin

Generic functions

Have you ever written a function for one type and then you had to write it again for another type? Perhaps you wrote a function that worked for strings and then had to write the same function again for integers.

To avoid such a case, functions can be generic in the types they use. This allows a function to be written that can work with any type, rather than a specific type only. To do this, we define the type parameters in the function signature:

    fun <T> printRepeated(t: T, k: Int): Unit { 
      for (x in 0..k) { 
        println(t) 
      } 
    } 

In this example, we print the t element k number of times. You might be thinking that we could have defined this function using Any and it would still work, since println is defined to accept Any itself. That's ...