On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 5:46 PM 'wagner riffel' via golang-nuts <golang-nuts@googlegroups.com> wrote: > > On 1/13/23 07:20, Gorka Guardiola wrote: > > According to the spec it seems like it is legal to shadow a type with a > > variable, even a builtin type. > > Is there any specific rationale for this? I guess that it makes scoping > > checks easier and faster, but still. > > > > I don't think there is any special rationale behind it, in Go builtin > types are predefined identifiers, not keywords as usual in other > languages, thus those follow rules of identifiers, not keywords. > Although it feels astonishing that you can shadow even predefined > constants like "true := false", in my experience this haven't shown to > be an issue.
There is a rationale: we can add new predeclared identifiers without breaking existing working code. For example, the Go 1.18 release added two new predeclared identifiers: `any` and `comparable`. Because they were predeclared identifiers, not keywords, existing code that used them as variable names continued to work. Ian -- 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/CAOyqgcXt%2BJ6_S_ndgGuxL3zqG1sZjnQ5ahvLd0hfPpWjAS_NLg%40mail.gmail.com.
