Creating & Using Classes

Class design techniques will give you an idea of the attributes that a class has, and the operations that it supports. The next step is to translate this into Kotlin code.

One of Kotlin’s strengths is that it allows classes to implemented in a very concise way. Attributes are implemented as properties, which can represent values stored within an object or values that are computed on demand. Operations are implemented as methods, also known as member functions, which look a lot like regular Kotlin functions.

One important issue to consider when implementing a class is the visibility of its members. The properties and methods of a Kotlin class are public by default, but it can sometimes be useful to hide them from class users, by making them private.

In this section, you will also learn about two more specialized kinds of class: data classes and enum classes.