On Wednesday, 20 November 2019 17:55:59 UTC, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > > The other kind of answer is that if a function returns a pointer to a > struct, a value of type *employee, then it's normal for that something > else to have a copy of that pointer, perhaps some data structure or > global variable. In your simple example that is the global variable > "dilbert". So it makes sense to permit setting a field of the result > of calling getEmployee(), a value of type *employee, as setting that > field will change the global variable "dilbert". But when > getEmployee() does not return a pointer, but just returns a value of > type "employee", then that is a copy of the value in the global > variable. Changing a field in that copy won't change anything. The > assignment will be made, and then the result will be discarded. Since > that operation is useless, the language does not permit it. >
Hi Ian and thanks for your prompt reply. This is exactly the kind of explanation that I was looking for and it makes complete sense now. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/7fb82fec-9430-4c5e-8005-ce86cda91921%40googlegroups.com.
