I posted a similar question, and no, this issue is not addressed by type alias. In the OSS world, I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen maintainers/designers slap a retort “this is by design”, without truly explaining the reasoning behind such a design (ternary operator, also see this for a non-Kt example), other than the obvious “I’m in the committee and you’re not”. Swift has already been mentioned, Scala can do this too using implicit class; what is being asked here is not dissimilar to using with.