Ok, this is annoying ``` fun test(a: Number, y: Number) { return a / y }``` It errors...

# getting-started

[Ray Rahke]

Ok, this is annoying

fun test(a: Number, y: Number) {
        return a / y
    }

It errors

Unresolved reference. None of the following candidates is applicable because of receiver type mismatch: 
public inline operator fun BigDecimal.div(other: BigDecimal): BigDecimal defined in kotlin
public inline operator fun BigInteger.div(other: BigInteger): BigInteger defined in kotlinkotlin(UNRESOLVED_REFERENCE_WRONG_RECEIVER)

I do not want to change the function signature to fun test(a: Double, y: Double)
I can do this internally to avoid changing the function signature

return a as Double / y as Double

But it is cumbersome.

Does the Number type not have any way to do division?

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

It doesn't support it because there's no way that makes sense by default to represent the result of the division. However, what you can do is convert them to big decimal first then divide, you just have to make that choice yourself.

operator fun Number.div(other: Number): BigDecimal = BigDecimal(toString()) / BigDecimal(other.toString())

You could also convert to Double instead.

[Arjan van Wieringen]

A long is Number, a double is a Number. What is the reslt of long / double or double / long?

[Ray Rahke]

implicitly treating both as either the upper or lower bound sounds reasonable to me.

[Ray Rahke]

If you do long / double, it could act as long / double as long

[Ray Rahke]

I tried earlier and it looks like even subtraction is not supported. You can't do a Number - Number

[Arjan van Wieringen]

But the compiler doesn't know what's what at compile time so it cant determine that.

[Arjan van Wieringen]

Do you even like programming in kotlin, because I get the feeling you don't 😄

[asdf asdf]

You could either create overloads for each standard number type, or just convert the number to a double/other decimal type which is what I usually do (using x.toDouble(), not x as Double as that’ll throw a CCE if the number isn’t already a double)

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

If you want something more complicated for representing operations that should work for any specified number type, then have a look at this. I came up with that encoding, so I'm happy to answer any questions!