Hello World

Let's get straight to the point - type this into a file with the extension .kt:

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
    println("Hello World!")
}

Only imports and declarations can exist at the top level of a Kotlin file. Therefore, "running" an individual file only makes sense if it contains an entry point, which must be a function called main with one argument called args of the type "array of strings". args will contain the command-line arguments that the program is invoked with, similarly to sys.argv in Python; it can be omitted if your program does not need to accept command-line arguments and you are using Kotlin 1.3:

fun main() {
    println("Hello World!")
}

The function body is delimited by curly braces - indentation is generally not significant in Kotlin, but you should of course indent your code properly for the benefit of human readers.

Comments are initiated with // and last until the end of the line. Block comments start with /* and end with */.

Like in Python, statements may be terminated by a semicolon, but it's discouraged. There is no line continuation character; instead, a line is automatically joined with one or more of the subsequent lines if that's the only way to make the code parse correctly. In practice, that means that a statement continues on the next line if we're inside an open parenthesis (like in Python), or if the line ends with a "dangling operator" (unlike in Python) or the following line doesn't parse unless it's joined to the previous one (also unlike in Python). Note that this is pretty much the opposite of JavaScript, which generally will keep joining lines as long as the resulting code still parses. Thus, the following is two expressions in Kotlin and in Python (because + can be unary, so the second line parses on its own), but one in JavaScript:

1 + 2
+ 3

This is one expression in both Kotlin (because the first line doesn't parse on its own) and JavaScript, and doesn't parse in Python:

1 + 2 +
3

So is the following. The difference between + and . is that + can be a unary operator, but . can't, so the only way to get the second line to parse is to join it with the preceding line:

x.foo()
 .bar()

This is one expression in all three languages:

(1 + 2
 + 3)

Don't split lines if the resulting two lines are also grammatically valid on their own (even if it results in a compilation error that is not directly related to the grammar of Kotlin). The following does not actually return the result of foo() - it returns a special value called Unit, which we'll cover later, and foo() is never called.

return    // Empty return statement
    foo() // Separate, unreachable statement

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.