I realize I’m just another new person to Go asking for features that have been
discussed many times before and that are very unlikely to be changed. But I’d
like to consider a kind of middle ground that applies to many potential
features.
I understand that many requests for syntax additions are rejected on two
grounds. One is that it is possible to abuse the feature, resulting in code
that is more difficult to understand. Another is that it makes the language
specification larger, adding to the list of things that new Go developers must
learn.
I see many proposals that would reduce the amount of code to be typed rejected
on the basis that doing that alone is not a valid reason to add a feature. For
things that would not be used often, I agree with that. But I want to discuss
two features that I use often in other languages.
The first is ternaries. What if only simple, non-nested ternaries were
supported? For example, color := temperature > 100 ? “red” : “blue”. This seems
so much more clear than the map[bool]:string trick that some have proposed.
Writing this with an if statement takes either 4 or 6 lines. This comes up
often enough in code to make a significant difference. I think it’s hard to
argue that this has the potential to make code harder to read if they can’t be
nested.
The second is arrow functions. What if only functions that return the result of
a single expression were supported? For example, n => n * 2. Compare this to
func (n int) { return n * 2 }. The value of this is closely tied to whether
generics are added to the language at some point.
Adding just a few things like these to the language might help with adoption
and that in itself is a worthwhile goal. I suspect many developers that love Go
aren’t currently using it on real projects. Getting more developers to consider
Go makes that more likely.
---
R. Mark Volkmann
Object Computing, Inc.
> On Aug 14, 2018, at 12:18 PM, Axel Wagner <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> There is lots of discussion findable here:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/golang-nuts/ternary%7Csort:date
> There's a bit of discussion on the issue tracker:
> https://github.com/golang/go/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=ternary+operator -- in
> particular https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23248
> There's more discussion on the reddit:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/5dqpab/what_is_the_reasoning_behind_go_not_having_a/
>
>
>> On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 6:43 PM Mark Volkmann <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> I’m new to Go and I imagine the idea of adding a ternary operator to Go has
>> been discussed many times. Rather than repeat that, can someone point me to
>> a discussion about why Go doesn’t add this? I’m struggling to understand why
>> it is desirable to write code like this:
>>
>> var color
>> if temperature > 100 {
>> color = “red”
>> } else {
>> color = “blue”
>> }
>>
>> Instead of this:
>>
>> var color = temperature > 100 ? “red” : “blue”
>>
>> Is the ternary really so confusing that it justifies writing 6 lines of code
>> instead of 1? I realize I could eliminate two lines like the following, but
>> this isn’t a good idea if the values come from function calls since there
>> would sometimes be needless function calls.
>>
>> var color = “blue”
>> if temperature > 100 {
>> color = “red”
>> }
>>
>> ---
>> R. Mark Volkmann
>> Object Computing, Inc.
>>
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