Explain the concept of type erasure and its impact on working with data types in programming languages.

Type erasure is a mechanism by which information about parameterized types (e.g., generics) is removed during compilation or at runtime.

In languages that support generics, such as Java or Kotlin, type erasure means that during execution, the program does not know the specific types of the parameters and works with them as with basic types (e.g., Object).

Impacts:

• Loss of information about specific types during runtime.
• Restrictions on operations with parameterized types (e.g., cannot create instances of type T directly, cannot use instanceof with parameterized types).
• Need for type casting when extracting data from generic structures.

For example, in Kotlin, generics are implemented through type erasure, so during compilation, specific types are removed, and only the base type remains in the bytecode.