Science & Reason

The way you declare a variable or function,  and the naming convention you use are very important, and some case differences affect scope too. In this lesson, we will learn :

1. What names to use?
2. What convention is recommended?
3. Scope of variable and function names

1. What names to use?

In Go, variable, functions, constants, packages..etc have names that start with either a letter or underscore. That is, the following names are allowed :

var myName string = "Mohamed" //variable name with camel case
var _age int = 30     //variable name starting with an underscore
myFunction      //function name with camel case
_my_function  //function name with underscores
myFunction30 //function name that ends with digits
const PI = 3.14  //constant names can start with a capital​

But the following name will cause an error:

var 1myName //starts with a digit 
var my-Name // "-" is not allowed
const #Pi  // '#' is not allowed
my Function   // spaces are not allowed​

That, and 24 keywords that are not allowed because they are already reserved, You cannot declare variables with the following names :

break		case		chan		const		continue
default		defer		else		fallthrough	for		
func		go		goto		if		import		
interface	map		package		range		return	
select		struct		switch		type		var​

And there are other names that can be used, but are not recommended as they can be a source of confusion (although there are cases where it is useful to re-declare them) :

true   false   iota   nil
int   int8   int16   int32   int64
uint   uint8   uint16   uint32   uint64   uintptr
float32   float64   complex128         complex64
bool   byte   rune   string   error
make   len   cap   new   append   copy
close   delete   complex   real   imag   panic
recover​

2. What convention is recommended ?

As for the convention used for names, I personally prefer the Camel Case , take some time to read about it. Following are some names that respect the Camel Case naming convention :

myName 
carFuelTank
housePrice
guestFullName
dbPassword​

Camel-cased names often start with a small letter. If the name is a compound of many words, then every other word (except the first) starts with a capital, asYouCanSeeAllWordsAreInCapitalsExceptTheFirstAs !

In Camel Case convention, underscores are not used to separate words, so the following names do not respect this convention (I hate names with underscores and digits) :

my_name 
car_fuel_tank 
db_password 
get_house_price​

Of course, there is an exception to this : exported variables,  We will see what these are soon.

3. Scope of variable and function names

When you declare a variable inside a function, that variable is only visible to that function. That is: You can only call the variable and use it inside the function's body.

To make the variable myVariable visible to all files and functions that reside in a given package pkg, i.e : all the files that start with package pkg , you have to declare the variable outside functions, just after the import instructions, like this :

package pkg

import "fmt"

var myVariable float32

// ... functions go here...​

So, in the previous example, any file that starts with  package pkg can use myVariable directly.

What if we want to use myVariable in a file that does not belong to the package pkg?

In this case you have to export the variable myVariable, export here means that the variable will become visible to all the packages that import our pkg package. And to export a variable or function...etc, All you need to do is capitalize it, so we change myVariable to MyVariable, as follows :

package pkg 

import "fmt" 

var MyVariable float32 

// ... functions go here...​

Then, to use the variable MyVariable from a file that belongs to a different package (say package pkgoo ) , we have to import pkg , and use pkg.MyVariable to use the variable (same thing for functions...etc).

package pkgoo 

import "pkg" 

// call a function here ..

myVar := pkg.MyVariable​

As you can see in the previous example, the file in the pkgoo package imports the pkg package , then uses the exported variable with pkg.MyVariable, We will see full examples in future lessons about packages and files.

That ends our lesson, in the next lesson we will learn about the basic types (like int, float32, string, boolean...etc).