Go for Beginners — Part 3

3 min readMar 3, 2021

In the previous article (Which can be found HERE) I covered an Introduction to Go and covered some little quirks the language has.

In this Article I’m going to be covering Variables and Data Types in Go.

Literals

In Go, values can be a lot of things. These can be written into code as is then they are literals as they literally are what they say they are

We can perform maths with literals exactly the same as we can in Python.

I’m starting to sense a trend here…

+ to add
- to subtract
* to multiply
/ to divide
% to find the remainder (Also known as the modulus operator)

We can perform math simply by using two numbers (or variables with numbers as there values) and the mathematical sign to do what we want

Constants

There are also things called Constants which is a data type that can not be updated while the program is running.

To define one of these we use the keyword const

const bruhMoment = "bruh"

These must be initialized with a value at the time of declaration

That right there created a variable that can not be updated while the program is running called bruhMoment with the assigned value of `bruh``

Simple right.

Basic Data Types In Go

Whoooo kinda more advanced but not too advanced stuff now.

So here is a few number Data Types in Go

String

A String is a essential Data Type as it holds a string of characters such as this sentence. To define a String you use the string keyword

Integer

An Integer (int) is a whole number, simple as that. To define an Integer you use the keyword int

var bruh int

Floating Points

A Floating Point (float) is any decimal number. To define a float you use the keyword float

var bruh float

Complex Numbers

This is something you probably won’t use unless you’re doing as the name says complex mathematical equations. A Complex Data Type holds the value of imaginary numbers and a good example of a use case for this is 2-d coordinates or calculations involving square roots. To Define a Complex data type you use the keyword complex

var bruh complex

Basic Numeric Data Types

This one is kinda important so pay attention!!

Go has loads of Numeric Data Types, this is to allow for as little memory to be allocated for the variable. This can marginally speed up performance but won’t necessarily make a noticeable difference unless it’s a really big or intensive task.

However i’m just going to cover the basic ones you will need to use

To read more about Numeric Data Types click HERE

As previously covered you’ll use int and float but in addition to that you will use bool which is the keyword for the boolean Data Type

A Boolean is a true or false value

Variables

We have a little background on what the different Data Types, We can now start to create some.

Variables can be declared either one of two ways. The first being longhand notation.

Longhand Notation

var variableName type

As you see you use the var keyword followed by the name and then the Data Type

This is mainly used when you need to explicitly state the variable type or don’t have the data to assign the variable

Shorthand Notation

The other much quicker way is through Shorthand Notation which looks like this;

variableName := value

Note that here you must assign the variable it’s value at the time of declaration

Zero Values

All variables unless assigned a value have a default value of zero

Summary

Thats a basic overview of Variables and Data Types within Go. In this Article i’ve briefly covered Variables within Go and gave you a brief look at different Data Types in Go.