is there any way to get around `'public' function ...

# getting-started

[Hullaballoonatic]

is there any way to get around 'public' function exposes 'private' return type?

[diesieben07]

Make the function private? 😄 🧌

[diesieben07]

In all seriousness, no, that's what you have to do. A public caller couldn't do anything with the return type anyways. So you might as well return either a public supertype or just Any

[Hullaballoonatic]

shame

[diesieben07]

Not sure what you would want this to do even. What's your use case?

[Hullaballoonatic]

Perhaps this is just a dumb way to organize everything

[Hullaballoonatic]

the vector interface is ~1000 lines of code. i'd rather it be called Vector because that's the type which can do all the work, and keeps things generalized.

[diesieben07]

Well, you can just specify the return type to be Vector in this case, no?

[Hullaballoonatic]

That wouldn't potentially eliminate the stored array in the basic vector?

[Hullaballoonatic]

please forgive me for not understanding some of these type interactions. i think it's a very complex aspect of oop

[diesieben07]

No, you are still returning an instance of BasicVector. You are just not baking that into the method contract.

[Hullaballoonatic]

okay, great, thanks for the help

[diesieben07]

The method says "I am returning any kind of `Vector`", and that happens to be a BasicVector in this case

[Hullaballoonatic]

Okay, wonderful

[Hullaballoonatic]

another question, do you prefer to move out a bunch of "boiler plate" code for your class into another file as extensions or do you find that a sloppy and improper way to organize things?

[diesieben07]

Definitely, that's what extension are for. They act as "utility functions" that help with usage of the class. I usually only put "core functionality" into the class, anything else that can be seen as a combination of this core functionality, I would do as an extension.

[Hullaballoonatic]

in this case, i ported over most of the kotlin stdlib collection functions to Vector, but i didn't want to simply extend List or something because Vectors aren't lists, and I didn't want to extend Iterable because that brings along functions i don't want for vectors

[Hullaballoonatic]

alright, thank you kindly for your input