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Millised on nüansid, kasutades tüüpi Nothing generics?

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The Nothing type in Kotlin is a special type that has no values and is used to denote functions that never return a result (for example, that throw an exception or run infinitely).

In the context of generics, Nothing plays an important role:

  • Used as the lower bound of a typeNothing is a subtype of all types, so it can be used to indicate that a type parameter cannot have values.
  • Allows expressing the absence of a value — for example, List<Nothing> is a list that cannot contain any elements.
  • Used to safely indicate the absence of a type in covariant positions.

Example of usage in generics:

fun <T> fail(): T {
    throw RuntimeException("Failure")
}

val x: String = fail() // The compiler understands that fail() returns `Nothing`, which is a subtype of String

Or in collections:

val emptyList: List<Nothing> = listOf()

Thus, Nothing helps the compiler understand that in some places there will be no values, and allows safe working with such cases in generics.