I'm looking to identify the term for something, what do you call it in kotlin when you invoke a method through the class while passing the

this

argument explicitly as in

(String::take)("hello", 3)

or even, what you call the

String::take

part?

http://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/reflection.html#function-references String::take is a function reference to the function take on the class String. The second parentheses ("hello", 3) is you actually invoking that function you are referencing. Not sure what you mean by passing this in this case.

for example, python would call this an "unbound method" with

str.upper

, c++ the closest would be "pointer-to-member" with

std::string::size

String::take

is function reference,

(String::take)("hello", 3)

is invoking function by reference (probably) 🙂