Three new books, Go Optimizations 101, Go Details & Tips 101 and Go Generics 101 are published now. It is most cost-effective to buy all of them through this book bundle in the Leanpub book store.

Keywords and Identifiers in Go

This article will introduce keywords and identifiers in Go.

Keywords

Keywords are the special words which help compilers understand and parse user code.

Up to now (Go 1.23), Go has only 25 keywords:

break     default      func    interface  select
case      defer        go      map        struct
chan      else         goto    package    switch
const     fallthrough  if      range      type
continue  for          import  return     var

They can be categorized as four groups:

These keywords will be explained in details in other articles.

Identifiers

An identifier is a token which must be composed of Unicode letters, Unicode digits and _ (underscore), and start with either an Unicode letter or _. Here,

keywords can not be used as identifiers.

Identifier _ is a special identifier, it is called blank identifier.

Later we will learn that all names of types, variables, constants, labels, package names and package import names must be identifiers.

An identifier starting with an Unicode upper case letter is called an exported identifier. The word exported can be interpreted as public in many other languages. The identifiers which don't start with an Unicode upper case letter are called non-exported identifiers. The word non-exported can be interpreted as private in many other languages. Currently (Go 1.23), eastern characters are viewed as non-exported letters. Sometimes, non-exported identifiers are also called unexported identifiers.

Here are some legal exported identifiers:
Player_9
DoSomething
VERSION
Ĝo
Π

Here are some legal non-exported identifiers:
_
_status
memStat
book
π
一个类型
변수
エラー

And here are some tokens which are illegal to be used as identifiers:
// Starting with a Unicode digit.
123
3apples

// Containing Unicode characters not
// satisfying the requirements.
a.b
*ptr
$name
a@b.c

// These are keywords.
type
range


(more articles ↡)

The Go 101 project is hosted on Github. Welcome to improve Go 101 articles by submitting corrections for all kinds of mistakes, such as typos, grammar errors, wording inaccuracies, description flaws, code bugs and broken links.

If you would like to learn some Go details and facts every serveral days, please follow Go 101's official Twitter account @zigo_101.

The digital versions of this book are available at the following places:
Tapir, the author of Go 101, has been on writing the Go 101 series books and maintaining the go101.org website since 2016 July. New contents will be continually added to the book and the website from time to time. Tapir is also an indie game developer. You can also support Go 101 by playing Tapir's games (made for both Android and iPhone/iPad):
Individual donations via PayPal are also welcome.

Articles in this book: