question about kotlin's language design: why are t...

# announcements

[LastExceed]

question about kotlin's language design:
why are the primary constructor parameters specified next to the class name? wouldnt it be way more consistent with secondary constructors and other functions to have them next to init ?

[Tim Fennis]

The simple answer is probably because a lot of Kotlin’s syntax is borrowed from Scala.

[LastExceed]

that doesn't really answer my question

[Tim Fennis]

Well Kotlin used the Scala syntax, and Scala probably based their syntax on Lisp. It’s pretty common in functional languages to define data types this way.

[LastExceed]

that may be so, but my question is: why? why is that common practice?

[Tim Fennis]

Well one of the reason is that this way of defining a class combines both the definitino of the class, with the definition of the contructor and the definition of the properties.

data class User(val id: Int, val name: String) is much shorter than defining a class, constructor and properties separately.

[LastExceed]

that is what i was looking for. ty