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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I am not familiar with Go, and have heard many praises of its declaration syntax, but is its dereference operator postfix? That would make sense in such a case.

On the other hand, IMHO the whole "make declarations read left-to-right" idea is misguided --- plenty of other constructs exist in programming languages which simply can't be read left-to-right, but are nested according to precedence. I mean, you might as well make 3+4*3 evaluate to 21 if you want to try making everything consistently left-to-right, but I don't really see anyone complaining about not being able to understand operator precedence...

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Go's defererence operator `*` is prefix, like in C.

The point here is that type declarations are regular to read, and those tend to be the tricky ones. Expressions tend not to be so difficult, and are more commonly factored if they become complex. For various reason, type declarations are not so practically factorable.

When I came to Go, I hadn't used C or C++ for over a decade, only Java and C# in between. Using explicitly written pointers came flooding back, but the new "C for expressions, Pascal for declarations" syntax still takes getting used to.

Declaring `v * T` means we can write `* v` as an expression, so the use of token * is synchronized for both these uses, but I must vocalize the * in my head differently:

  `*T` vocalizes as "pointer to something of type T"
  `*v` vocalizes as "that pointed to by variable v"
  `&v` vocalizes as "pointer to variable v"

So my thought process when I see * goes: If it's in a type, say "pointer to", otherwise say the opposite of "pointer to", i.e. "that pointed to by". It feels like an inconsistent use of * whenever I'm writing Go code -- even though I know it's a natural result of Go using Pascal-style declaration syntax but C-style tokens.

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