More Expressions, Fewer Statements
Explore how Kotlin emphasizes expressions rather than statements, unlike Java. Understand the benefits of expressions that return values and avoid side effects, enabling clearer, less error-prone code. This lesson covers Kotlin's use of if and try-catch as expressions and explains why assignments are treated differently, improving your grasp of concise Kotlin syntax.
We'll cover the following...
Languages like Java, C#, and JavaScript have more statements than expressions—if statement, for statement, try, and so on. On the other hand, languages like Ruby, F#, Groovy, Haskell, and many others have more expressions than statements. Let’s discuss which is better before we discuss Kotlin’s preference.
Drawbacks of statements
While statements are prevalent, they have a dark side—they don’t return anything and have side effects. A side effect is a change of state: mutating a variable, writing to a file, updating to a database, sending data to a ...