I am by trade and tutelage, a PHP developer. I can also work in JavaScript, TypeScript, and React. The bulk of my work has been done in PHP. As someone pretty heavily entrenched in WordPress ecosystem, this served me well.
However, as I am looking to new horizons, it is becoming apparent to me that I will need to stretch my language skills even further. So let’s start with Go. Please enjoy my ramblings as I learn 🙂
I am starting with a really basic w3schools.com tutorial to see what the differences in syntax are.
A Go file consists of the following parts:
https://www.w3schools.com/go/go_syntax.php
- Package declaration
- Import packages
- Functions
- Statements and expressions
From a PHP perspective, this sounds pretty similar.
- Package declaration => PHP Namespaces. It gives the program or file scope or limitations
- Import packages -> In PHP, this was done by the
usestatements. It allowed you to pull in functions from other namespaces, classes, or even just a single function - Funcations => This is pretty self explanatory
- Statements and expressions => I am intrigued…
Syntax
In Go, statements are separated by ending a line (hitting the Enter key) or by a semicolon “
;“.Hitting the Enter key adds “
https://www.w3schools.com/go/go_syntax.php;” to the end of the line implicitly (does not show up in the source code).
❓ Does this mean there are hidden semicolons throughout the code, or does the complier read a new line as a semicolon?
The answer seems to be yes, under certain conditions. I guess for now, I will continue to explicitly write out my semicolons to avoid confusion until I am more comfortable working in Go. Also, to avoid causing myself grief when I switch back to other languages.
Comments
- Single line comments start with
// - Multiline comments are encased in
/* {your comment here} */
Creating variables
- Use
var- Benefit: this allows you to specify the type of the variable (e.g.
var test string = "some words";) - This notation can be used within a function or without
- Allows for value assignment to be done separately from declaration
- Always requires at least a type or value
- ✅
var test string = "string"; - ✅
var test string; - ✅
var test = "string"; - ❌
var test;
- ✅
- Benefit: this allows you to specify the type of the variable (e.g.
- use
:=- This is a new notation to me, I would have easily mixed it up for a logic statement if I had run into it in the wild
- Benefit: It is a shorthand and so it may be faster to use
- Like Typescript, the compiler infers the type of the variable based on the value
- This notation can only be used within a function
- Value must always be assigned at declaration
- It is not possible to declare a variable without a value using this notation (which makes sense)
- ❌
test string := "string";(I think this would set a variablestringas"string") - ❌
test := null;(null and empty strings both throw an error) - ✅
test := "string";
- ❌
- Declaring multiple vatiables
- Similar to a mathematical matrix, you can declare multiple variables and values at the same time
- So, for example
var a, b = 6, "Hello!"; is the same thing as declaringvar a = 6; var b = "Hello!"; - If you declaring multiple variables at the same time only supports one type
- ✅
var a, b string = "A", "B"; - ❌ var a string, b int = “A”, 2;
- ✅
- So, for example
- Similar to a mathematical matrix, you can declare multiple variables and values at the same time
Go variable naming rules:
https://www.w3schools.com/go/go_variable_naming_rules.php
- A variable name must start with a letter or an underscore character (_)
- A variable name cannot start with a digit
- A variable name can only contain alpha-numeric characters and underscores (
a-z, A-Z,0-9, and_)- Variable names are case-sensitive (age, Age and AGE are three different variables)
- There is no limit on the length of the variable name
- A variable name cannot contain spaces
- The variable name cannot be any Go keywords
Variable names support camel case, pascal case, and snake case.
Constants
Seems constants work as expected, they should be declare once, are unchangeable and read-only, can be typed or have the type inferred from the value. To make constants easy to identify, they should be written in uppercase letters (e.g. “USER_AGE”, not “userAge”, or “UserAge”, or “user_age”)
Output
Print()- Prints out the value only, can have multiple comma separated arguments passed in (e.g.
Print( "Hello", " ", "World");) Reminds me of the Google Sheets functionConcatenate.
- Prints out the value only, can have multiple comma separated arguments passed in (e.g.
Println()- Adds whitespace between arguments and new line at the end. So
Println( "Hello", "World");prints outHello World.
- Adds whitespace between arguments and new line at the end. So
- Printf()
- Allows integrating the type or value of a variable into a string.
package main;
import ("fmt");
func main() {
var userName string = "Jane";
fmt.Printf( "Hello %v!", userName );
// Prints "Hello Jane!"
fmt.Printf( "The name %v is a %t", userName, username );
// Prints "The name Jane is a string"
}
The values are integrated into the string using formatting verbs.
I’m stopping here for today. The next item up in the tutorial are arrays, and they are definitely different than how they work in PHP. I’ll save that for next time.
Jess Boctor 