It seems that the only way to do this at low cost ...

# anko

[yan]

It seems that the only way to do this at low cost is to use SpannableStringBuilder, which is stateful by its nature. Maybe something like this?

buildSpannableString {
    append(“A”, Bold)
    append(“B”, Bold, Italic)
    append("C")
}

This is consistent with the buildString() function in Kotlin stdlib.
This introduces state, but only inside the lambda, so the state is quite local.