Introducing Go

Chapter 7. Structs and Interfaces

Although it would be possible for us to write programs only using Go’s built-in data types, at some point it would become quite tedious. Consider a program that interacts with shapes:

package main

import ("fmt"; "math")

func distance(x1, y1, x2, y2 float64) float64 {
    a := x2 – x1
    b := y2 – y1
    return math.Sqrt(a*a + b*b)
}

func rectangleArea(x1, y1, x2, y2 float64) float64 {
    l := distance(x1, y1, x1, y2)
    w := distance(x1, y1, x2, y1)
    return l * w
}

func circleArea(x, y, r float64) float64 {
    return math.Pi * r*r
}

func main() {
    var rx1, ry1 float64 = 0, 0
    var rx2, ry2 float64 = 10, 10
    var cx, cy, cr float64 = 0, 0, 5

    fmt.Println(rectangleArea(rx1, ry1, rx2, ry2))
    fmt.Println(circleArea(cx, cy, cr))
}

This program finds the area of a rectangle and a circle. Keeping track of all the coordinates makes it difficult to see what the program is doing and will likely lead to mistakes.

Structs

An easy way to make this program better is to use a struct. A struct is a type that contains named fields. For example, we could represent a circle like this:

type Circle struct {
    x float64
    y float64
    r float64
}

The type keyword introduces a new type. It’s followed by the name of the type (Circle), the keyword struct to indicate that we are defining a struct type, and a list of fields inside of curly braces.

Fields are like a set of grouped variables. Each field has a name and a type and is stored adjacent to the other fields in the struct. Like with functions, we ...