Any and Nothing Classes
We'll cover the following...
Some methods like equals()
and toString()
are pervasive. In Java you’d expect to find them in the Object
base class. In Kotlin, these methods are included in the Any
class, along with a number of other methods that are useful on instances of any class. Any is Kotlin’s counterpart of Java’s Object
class, except Any
has a lot of special methods that come in through extension functions. Kotlin also has a class named Nothing
that serves to stand in as type when a function literally is expected to return nothing—this is useful for type-checking methods when one or more branches is expected to return nothing. Nothing in Java is equivalent to Kotlin’s Nothing
. In this section you’ll learn about the facilities offered by the ubiquitous Any
and the purpose of Nothing
.