How I became a Go contributor, and you can, too.

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Unlocking the Power of Infrastructure as Code, Go, & More

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Checking in on those New Years resolutions.

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Keywords The following keywords are reserved and may not be used as identifiers. break default func interface select case defer go map struct chan else goto package switch const fallthrough if range type continue for import return var Operators and punctuation The following character sequences represent operators (including assignment operators) and punctuation: + & += &= && == != ( ) - | -= |= || < <= [ ] * ^ *= ^= <- > >= { } / << /= <<= ++ = := , ; % >> %= >>= -- !

Identifiers Identifiers name program entities such as variables and types. An identifier is a sequence of one or more letters and digits. The first character in an identifier must be a letter. identifier = [letter](https://go.dev/ref/spec#letter) { [letter](https://go.dev/ref/spec#letter) | [unicode_digit](https://go.dev/ref/spec#unicode_digit) } . So in other words, every identifier must begin with a letter, followed by zero or more letters and/or digits. Pretty simple. The spec offers a few examples a _x9 ThisVariableIsExported αβ That second one looks a bit suspicious.

Go’s use of semicolons is one area of confusion for newcomers to the language. It certainly was for me. But it’s more intuitive than it seems. Here’s the formal explanation: Semicolons The formal syntax uses semicolons ";" as terminators in a number of productions. Go programs may omit most of these semicolons using the following two rules: When the input is broken into tokens, a semicolon is automatically inserted into the token stream immediately after a line’s final token if that token is

Tokens Tokens form the vocabulary of the Go language. There are four classes: identifiers, keywords, operators and punctuation, and literals. White space, formed from spaces (U+0020), horizontal tabs (U+0009), carriage returns (U+000D), and newlines (U+000A), is ignored except as it separates tokens that would otherwise combine into a single token. Also, a newline or end of file may trigger the insertion of a semicolon. While breaking the input into tokens, the next token is the longest sequence of characters that form a valid token.