The Go Programming Language

2.7 Scope

A declaration associates a name with a program entity, such as a function or a variable. The scope of a declaration is the part of the source code where a use of the declared name refers to that declaration.

Don’t confuse scope with lifetime. The scope of a declaration is a region of the program text; it is a compile-time property. The lifetime of a variable is the range of time during execution when the variable can be referred to by other parts of the program; it is a run-time property.

A syntactic block is a sequence of statements enclosed in braces like those that surround the body of a function or loop. A name declared inside a syntactic block is not visible outside that block. The block encloses its declarations and determines ...