Implicit and explicit keywords

[ezio1497]

I think conversation would be much more easier if Kotlin would use the keywords implicit and explicit like C#, it would first make converting numeric values less painful than using the .toType() functions.
It would also make creating new numeric classes easier, even old ones like BigDecimal.

[tieskedh]

Kotlin hates implicit, so this is not going to happen.

First, it’s hard to understand if not used correctly:

Union types

The Kotlin guys are very against implicits. Everything in Kotlin is explicit. Even a conversion from Int to Long has to be done explicity. Scala's implicits are one of the major culprits for long compilation times. I once wrote an article about it: https://dzone.com/articles/implicits-scala-conversion. Then they are a real problem for code readability if over used. There was once a thread on Scala's user group where someone was asking for a special debugger to debug what implicit conversions are…

and second there is a technical issue:
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/basic-types.html#explicit-conversions

[harrywyt428]

Also agreed to add the implicit and explicit keywords, especially cooperating with the operator keyword. In C#, an implicit keyword is used to declare an implicit user-defined type conversion operator, in other words, this gives the power to your C# class, which can accepts any reasonably convertible data type without type casting.