Overview of the basic program

Table of Contents

In this lesson, you will write your first Kotlin program, which prints “Hello, World!” This is the first step that every beginner is to take. Although the program itself is very simple, it is still a working program, and it shows the basic syntax of the programming language.

Hello, World

Here it comes. Below is the source code of this program:

fun main() {
    println("Hello, World!")
}

If you have already installed a programming environment on your computer, you may run the program there. If not, do not worry. We will get back to this.

Basic terminology

After you have seen the result, let’s learn the basic terminology and then try to understand our program.

A program is a sequence of instructions (called statements), which are executed one after another in a predictable manner. Sequential flow is the most common and straightforward situation when statements are executed in the order they are written, i.e., from top to bottom, one after another;
A statement (or a programming statement) is a single command to be executed (like printing a text);
An expression is a piece of code that produces a single value (for example, 2*2 is an expression);
A block is a group of zero or more statements enclosed in a pair of curly braces {...}; our program consists of a single block;
A keyword is a word that has a special meaning in the programming language. Names of keywords can’t be changed;
An identifier (or a name) is a word written by the programmer to identify something;
A comment is a piece of text that is ignored when executing the program – it just explains a part of the code. Comments start with //;
Whitespace is a blank area, a tab, or a newline; it is used to separate words in the program and to improve readability.

The Hello World program under a microscope

The Hello World program illustrates the use of the basic elements of any Kotlin program. Right now, we will consider only the most important ones.

The entry point. The keyword fun defines a function that contains a piece of code to execute. This function has a special name main. It indicates the entry point of a Kotlin program. The function has a body enclosed in braces {...}.

fun main() { 
    // ...
}

We will discuss the functions later. The name of this function should always be the same: main. If you name it Main or MAIN or something else, the program will not start.

Note: The text after // is just a comment, not a part of the program. Further, we will learn how to write comments.

Printing “Hello, World!”. The body of this function consists of programming statements that define what the program is to do. Our program prints the string “Hello, World!” using the following statement:

println("Hello, World!")

This is one of the most important things to understand about the Hello World program. We invoke the special function println to display a string followed by a new line on the screen. We will often use this way to print something.

Remember that "Hello, World!" is not a keyword or a name, it is just a string literal to be printed on the screen.

Programs with multiple statements

As a rule, a program contains multiple statements. You should start a new line to write each statement. For example, the program below has two statements:

fun main() {
    println("Hello")
    println("World")
}

If you run the program, you will see that it displays this:

Hello
World

Conclusion

Congratulations! We have written our first program, which prints “Hello, World!” It has one function named main, which represents the entry point of this program. Don’t worry about all those terms (syntax, statement, block) for now – we will explain them throughout this course. Don’t forget to use your first code as a template for your future programs.

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