Go: Variables

In this lesson, we will learn:

  1. What is a variable?
  2. Two declaration and assignment methods.
  3. Side note : Comments

1. What is a variable?

To understand what variables are, think of this example: suppose there is a title 'Guest', every person who books a room will be a 'Guest' until they leave. Another person will book the room and take the title 'Guest'... So, the title 'Guest' is always there to be taken.

Consider our inn room as being a storage memory (i.e RAM), that is: space where you can store data. The persons that book the room as values. And the title Guest as a variable linked to the room itself, the title whose value changes: Sometimes it takes the value of 'Joe', sometimes 'Mark' or 'Jack'..etc.

To declare a variable, then, is to build the room (prepare storage memory in other words) and create the title Guest (call that memory location Guest). In technical terms, we say : to allocate memory or memory allocation.

2. Two declaration and assignment methods

In order to declare a variable in Go, we use one of two methods:

  • The traditional declaration (with var).
  • The short declaration

To declare a variable with var, following is the syntax:

var guest string

The previous code declares a variable with the name guest, of type string. You can think of strings as text variables, like names, addresses, messages...etc.

To declare a variable and assign a value at the same time:

var guest string = "Joe"

Here, we allocate a memory location (we will see the size of this memory for strings and other types in a future lesson), and we call it guest ,  and we store a value "Joe" in it, that is the name of the guest.

You can also declare the variable guest in one line, and assign the value in another line, like this :


var guest string 

/** 
some code here 
**/ 

guest = "Joe"

Remember that = does not mean equals in Go ( == is used instead for equality checks). It is an assignment, that is : we assign the value "Joe" to the variable Guest, in other words, we save the string "Joe" in a memory location we already allocated by var guest string.

For the type string, there are other types for integers, floating-point numbers, booleans...etc. So, we can use var age int, var price float32 for example.

There is more to be said about declarations and assignments with var , but for the sake of simplicity, we will back to that later.

To declare a variable (and assign a value) using the short declaration method, you can use the following syntax (with the symbol := ) :

guest := "Joe"

And it says : declare a variable whose name is guest, and assign (or store) a value "Joe" to it. The Go compiler automatically knows that guest is of type string as it can guess it from the value, as "Joe" cannot be a number.

Remember : You can only use this type of declaration and assignment inside a function's body. Like this :


func newGuest(){

guest := "Joe" 

}​

But never outside a function.

Now as we have seen the two methods of declaring and assignment values to variables, when it is recommended to use each ?

As a general rule of thumb : use the short method with := whenever you have these conditions met (at least).

  1. The variable is being declared inside a function.
  2. The desired type is surely the type the compiler will guess.
  3. There source code is big and messy, and you need to get done in fewer lines

The first  is obvious, since you cannot use := outside a function.

As for the second, suppose that you have a variable Latitude that you declared and initialized with a value of zero, with the intention of changing that value later to 48.864716 ,which is latitude of Paris in the Geographic Coordinate System (GCS).

latitude := 0  

/** some code that retrieves 
the latitude of Paris **/  

latitude = 48.864716

There is an error in the previous code, the use of latitude := 0 declares a variable latitude of type int (i.e : integer), since the compiler guesses that the variable is an integer, while the value 48.864716​ is a floating point. So, there is an error here.

$ constant 48.8647 truncated to integer​

To fix this, either use var latitude float32  , or use latitude := 0.00 to tell the compiler that it is in fact a floating-point number variable that you want to declare :


/*Either use this:*/  
latitude := 0.00  
latitude = 48.864716  

/*Or this:*/  
var latitude float32  
latitude = 48.864716  

/*But this is an error!*/  
latitude := 0 /*declared and assigned integer*/ 
latitude = 48.864716 /*assigns a float to an integer!*/

We will learn more about variables, declarations, assignments and types in future lessons.

3. Side Note : Comments

Comments are used to add notes, or to ignore some code in case you want to test something. Single line comments start with // , and multi-line comments open with /* and close with */


var guest string = "Xiao Ming"  


/* 
This is a multi-line  
comment and will be  
ignored by the compiler.

This code will be ignored too : 
fmt.Println("I will not be compiled !")
*/

fmt.Printf("%s is our guest")  

//this is a comment and will be ignored

That's it for this lesson, in the next lesson we will learn about constants.