In Kotlin objects, there can be a conflict between...

# codereview

[Toshihiro Nakamura]

In Kotlin objects, there can be a conflict between property names and the type names of values. For example, in the following code, the java property conflicts with java.time.OffsetDateTime, resulting in an error message: Unresolved reference 'time'.

object MyObject {
    val java: Boolean = true
    val someTime: OffsetDateTime = java.time.OffsetDateTime.now()
}

I understand that this can be avoided in one of the following ways:
• Change the property name java
• Use import statements to avoid the fully qualified name
• Create an alias for java.time.LocalDateTime and refer to it
Is there any other way to resolve this issue?
I am creating code generation tool, so I am looking for a solution that can be applied uniformly in all cases, rather than a workaround that is applied only under specific conditions.

[Toshihiro Nakamura]

I came up with a solution to create another object to hold the values:

object __MyObject {
    val __java: Boolean = true
    val __someTime: OffsetDateTime = java.time.OffsetDateTime.now()
}

object MyObject {
    val java: Boolean = __MyObject.__java
    val someTime: OffsetDateTime = __MyObject.__someTime
}

Do you have any comments on this?

[hho]

You can just use backticks:

object MyObject {
    val java: Boolean = true
    val someTime: java.time.OffsetDateTime = `java.time`.OffsetDateTime.now()
}

[Toshihiro Nakamura]

Thank you very much!
I didn’t know we can use backticks for package names.
This is very helpful.

[Klitos Kyriacou]

It seems unfortunate that the Java designers chose the dot (.) to separate parts of a package name. Package names are not really hierarchical. The "java" part of "java.time" can't stand on its own, and there's no sibling relationship between packages "a.b" and "a.c" any more than there is between "a.b" and "c.d". So they've overloaded a punctuation character that is otherwise used to separate a field from an object, and given us this unforeseen headache.