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Comment by exim | Hacker News Reader

Could someone point out, what is the reasoning of putting types after variable names? i.e. why not `int i` instead of `var i int` ?

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It is more readable, if have multiple declarations, since the names are aligned instead of the types.

  var x int
  var foo map[string]int
  var dummy []int

compared to

  var int x
  var map[string] int foo
  var []int dummy

See http://golang.org/doc/articles/gos_declaration_syntax.html

It's easier to parse. You don't have to do the lexer hack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lexer_hack), for example.

This is mentioned somewhere but it removes the ambiguity and bugs that can be introduced by pointer types.

Consider: int* i, j (or rather int *i, j)

Well, there's no ambiguity in this case, because "int" is a keyword, known to the compiler, and will always be interpreted as a type. But if you had something like "x*y,z", then the meaning of this would depend on whether x is a type or not.

I think this is more in reference to the common C error of:-

    int* x, y;

when you meant to declare both x and y as int pointers, here only x will be a pointer and y will be a straight int.

Obviously the go designers could have chosen to simply make this mean that both x and y are pointers, however this would be somewhat confusing for those familiar with C.

As iand says, there is a rather good article on this which goes into a lot more detail - http://golang.org/doc/articles/gos_declaration_syntax.html

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