can someone give me a simple explanation why they ...

# getting-started

[Florian]

can someone give me a simple explanation why they didn't just use const as a standalone keyword instead of const val? There is no other const combination as far as I see it

[Kirill Zhukov]

`const`s are assigned in compile time, `val`s are assigned in runtime.

[Kirill Zhukov]

Which is why you can only assign primitives and strings to a const, and can’t assign function results.

[Kirill Zhukov]

But I guess your question is more about why not just const?

[Florian]

yep, why not just const

[Kirill Zhukov]

const is a modifier in this case, where as val is a keyword. val indicates a value that cannot be reassigned and by default it’s assigned in runtime.

[Kirill Zhukov]

In comparison const is a modifier to a val keyword, it says how the value is being assigned.

[Kirill Zhukov]

It’s very similar to visibility modifiers

[Kirill Zhukov]

you have class keyword and private modifier

[Kirill Zhukov]

having some sort of privateClass keyword (since we have functions and other things) would be redundant, if it makes sense

[Kirill Zhukov]

Having const is more flexible this way

[Kirill Zhukov]

And less overlapping

[Florian]

ok, but why didn't they make it a keyword when it's never used in another context?

[Kirill Zhukov]

Flexibility

[Kirill Zhukov]

I saw some discussions around being able to apply const modifier on functions

[Florian]

so they want to keep the possibility open?

[Florian]

Right now const can't be used somewhere else, or can it?

[Kirill Zhukov]

That’s my understanding

[Kirill Zhukov]

Yeah, I don’t think it can be used elsewhere currently

[Florian]

ok, thank you very much

[ilya.gorbunov]

const is a soft keyword, that means it can be used in other places just as a usual identifier, e.g.

val const = kotlin.random.Random.nextInt()
println(const)

[Kirill Zhukov]

neat

[Florian]

but that's not the reasoning behind that is it?

[Florian]

It's just a side-effect

[arekolek]

AFAIK, having as few hard keywords as possible is one of the goals