Conditionals

if/else

if/else works the same way as in Python, but it's else if instead of elif, the conditions are enclosed in parentheses, and the bodies are enclosed in curly braces:

val age = 42
if (age < 10) {
    println("You're too young to watch this movie")
} else if (age < 13) {
    println("You can watch this movie with a parent")
} else {
    println("You can watch this movie")
}

The curly braces around a body can be omitted if the body is a oneliner. This is discouraged unless the body goes on the same line as the condition, because it makes it easy to make this mistake, especially when one is used to Python:

if (age < 10)
    println("You're too young to watch this movie")
    println("You should go home") // Mistake - this is not a part of the if body!

Without the curly braces, only the first line is a part of the body. Indentation in Kotlin matters only for human readers, so the second print is outside the if and will always be executed.

An if/else statement is also an expression, meaning that a ternary conditional (which looks like result = true_body if condition else false_body in Python) looks like this in Kotlin:

val result = if (condition) trueBody else falseBody

When using if/else as an expression, the else part is mandatory (but there can also be else if parts). If the body that ends up being evaluated contains more than one line, it's the result of the last line that becomes the result of the if/else.

Comparisons

Structural equality comparisons are done with == and !=, like in Python, but it's up to each class to define what that means, by overriding equals() (which will be called on the left operand with the right operand as the parameter) and hashCode(). Most built-in collection types implement deep equality checks for these operators and functions. Reference comparisons - checking if two variables refer to the same object (the same as is in Python) - are done with === and !==.

Boolean expressions are formed with && for logical AND, || for logical OR, and ! for logical NOT. As in Python, && and || are short-circuiting: they only evaluate the right-hand side if it's necessary to determine the outcome. Beware that the keywords and and or also exist, but they only perform bitwise operations on integral values, and they do not short-circuit.

There are no automatic conversions to boolean and thus no concept of truthy and falsy: checks for zero, empty, or null must be done explicitly with == or !=. Most collection types have an isEmpty() and an isNotEmpty() function.

when

We're not going to cover the when expression in depth here since it doesn't have a close equivalent in Python, but check it out - it's pretty nifty, as it lets you compare one expression against many kinds of expressions in a very compact way (but it's not a full functional-programming-style pattern matcher). For example:

val x = 42
when (x) {
    0 -> println("zero")
    in 1..9 -> println("single digit")
    else -> println("multiple digits")
}

This material was written by Aasmund Eldhuset; it is owned by Khan Academy and is licensed for use under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. Please note that this is not a part of Khan Academy's official product offering.