the shortest way to write your function would probably be

2.0.pow(3)

with a

.toInt()

if you need it - but maybe the result would be better represented as a long or a BigInteger, depends on the size of your input, and the compiler can’t account for that

if you peek into its definition, you’ll find that

kotlin.math.pow

just delegates to

java.lang.Math

on the JVM

and if you :google:

integer power java

you get this 😒tackoverflow: post https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8071363/calculating-powers-of-integers