September 2018
Beginner
360 pages
9h 28m
English
Content preview from Get Programming with GoBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Lesson 27. Much ado about nil
After reading lesson 27, you’ll be able to
- Do something with nothing
- Understand the trouble with nil
- See how Go improves on nil’s story
The word nil is a noun that means nothing or zero. In the Go programming language, nil is a zero value. Recall from unit 2 that an integer declared without a value will default to 0. An empty string is the zero value for strings, and so on. A pointer with nowhere to point has the value nil. And the nil identifier is the zero value for slices, maps, and interfaces too.
Many programming languages incorporate the concept of nil, though they may call it NULL, null, or None. In 2009, prior to the release of Go, language designer Tony Hoare gave a presentation titled “Null References: ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.