Lately I was playing with google's new programming language Go
and was wondering why the assignment operator := has a colon in front of the equal sign =
Is there a particular reason why the authors of the language wanted to use name := "John" instead of name = "John"
Answer
The := notation serves both as a declaration and as initialization.
foo := "bar"
is equivalent to
var foo = "bar"
Why not using only foo = "bar" like in any scripting language, you may ask ? Well, that's to avoid typos.
foo = "bar"
fooo = "baz" + foo + "baz" // Oops, is fooo a new variable or did I mean 'foo' ?