Reified generics

Previously in this chapter, we mentioned inline functions. Since inline functions are copied, we can get rid of one of the major JVM limitations: type erasure. After all, inside the function, we know exactly what type we're getting.

Let's look at the following example. We would like to create a generic function that will receive a Number (Number can either be Int or Long), but will only print it if it's of the same type as the function type.

We'll start with a naïve implementation, simply trying the instance check on the type directly:

fun <T> printIfSameType(a: Number) { 
    if (a is T) { // <== Error 
        println(a)    
    } 
}

However, this code won't compile and we'll get the following error:

> Cannot check for instance of erased type: T

What we usually do in Java, in this case, is pass the class...