why do I not need an L suffix in Kotlin to create a Long literal

Because otherwise it is

Int

literal 🙂

But it is not needed

Kotlin does not have implicit cast of primitive types.

fun longConsumer(long: Long) {
    println(long)
}

longConsumer(42)

works in a scratch file ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When you assign a large number to a variable it infers it as Long without the L

It's all about the compiler being able to infer what you want.

right, but in Java a number literal without an L is an int

Well Kotlin isn't Java :) if you leave a numeric literal ambiguous and the compiler determines that int and long are both acceptable, I really like that it will use a long. Otherwise, what's the point in me having such a large literal in my code if it's just going to get overflowed anyways

yea it makes sense

Java was generally verbose and explicit, so inferring what you probably meant to do wasn't really a thing.

Ok thank you