Hello! Apologies if this is a stupid question. Is there guidance for how to name something that conflicts with a language name / type? For example, I’m writing some code that handles measurements and units, and converting between units. Do I just name something “Unit,” and resign myself to writing

kotlin.Unit

to disambiguate?

You have a unit that’s just called

Unit

?

Yeah, it describes a unit.

But that is

MeasurementUnit

, so there is no collision with

kotlin.Unit

. You’re all good

Correct. That was the other name I came up with. Ideally I’d call it

Unit

, which is why I asked my question.

Ah ok

I think that's the right call. Calling it Unit is certainly possible but will make it difficult to use and that's the last thing you want for your library.

Many codebases will have their own

Result

type, for example, which collides with

kotlin.Result

Okay. I wasn’t sure if Kotlin had some convention or way to deal with interfering types. Sometimes there’s a convention, like prepending with a letter, or using some language feature to disambiguate.

Sometimes there’s a convention, like prepending with a letter, or using some language feature to disambiguate.

There is: it's package names and import aliases. But those are the user's responsibility, so if it's a type you use a lot, it's probably worth having a different name to avoid the hassle

if 100% of your users will rename your

Unit

with an import alias, you might as well do it for them 🙂

Agreed. Many times I have imported

kotlin.Result

by accident

I've also seen

SIUnit

used for this problemspace

I wouldn’t be against

SIUnit

, however it would also represent non-SI units…

UnitDefinition, UnitModel, UnitBase

seems perhaps like decent alternatives as well in addition to

MeasurementUnit

.