Can anyone explain what this type hint in intellij means?

# intellij

[kevin.cianfarini]

Can anyone explain what this type hint in intellij means?

[mkrussel]

I'm guessing that phoneNumber is a nullable range of strings. That would not be what I would expect the type of a phoneNumber variable to be.

[kevin.cianfarini]

I don’t believe string ranges exist? https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin.ranges/-closed-range/#inheritors

[kevin.cianfarini]

Also this is interoping with java code that should just be a string

[mkrussel]

String implements Comparable so you can have a ClosedRange<String>. But I just created a range of strings and I don't get that in the type hint. So I'm at a lost on what it would mean

[kevin.cianfarini]

This is the declaration of phone_number.

[kevin.cianfarini]

I wonder if this is an IDE bug?

[mkrussel]

It cold be indicating that it is nullable or not nulable, but I would have thought that would be String!.

Seems like a bug

[kevin.cianfarini]

yeah I agree. If it can’t figure out nullability, it should be a platform type

[Klitos Kyriacou]

This seems to be a change made in 2021.3. For example, I have a statement like this (using slf4j):

val logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(...)

The older release, 2021.2.x, shows the type hint as Logger! whereas the new release shows it as (Logger..Logger?).

[kevin.cianfarini]

Very strange way to denote platform types. It’s extra confusing because this conflates the syntax for ranges with nullability.

[Klitos Kyriacou]

I suppose it's meant to be a clever way of saying "the type of this variable ranges from X to nullable X". But it's not easy to parse visually/mentally. I prefer the old way. Also, it's inconsistent with other ways of getting hints, e.g. ctrl+Enter still shows "X!".

[Alexey Belkov [JB]]

Will be fixed in IDEA 2022.1: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KTIJ-20438