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Comment by DoubleCluster | Hacker News Reader

  Let’s say I want to declare a pointer to a variable length
  array (what Python calls a list and Go calls a slice) of
  pointers to FooType objects:

     var foo *[]*FooType

  It reads very simply ...

What???? Not that it's better in other languages but this makes the article feel like satire. It reads like "The Ugly" and "The Bad".

Aside: What's with the completely defective comment syntax on HN? Can anyone give some hints on how to quote and how to escape the star character?

edit: formatting, thanks spacemanaki

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It's in comparison to the clockwise spiral rule: http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html

Cool site: http://cdecl.org/

Right, it may be a tiny bit better but it's still not easy to read. The only way to make it actually readable is with typedefs.

Which is such a baroque rule that it's probably not even a rule: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5079787

Go's declaration syntax is one of the best things about the language. I thought it would take me forever to get used to, but within a day it was the opposite: C feels backwards. It's especially excellent for references to functions.

How so? There is a well thought out reason for this ordering [1], and it has taken hold in many other languages, such as rust and scala. Compare with the complexity of c or c++ type signatures.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/articles/gos_declaration_syntax.html

I don't think there would be a simpler way of describing a type as complex as "a pointer to a slice of pointers to FooType".

Simpler variables are declared as

    var a int

or with type inference:

    var a = 10

Two examples come to mind:

    [FooType]

and:

    Slice<FooType>

If you think you must, apply sigils. The position of the brackets in the Go version is atypically bad for readability.

I don't understand.

Where do your examples say they're pointers?

How would you express this using your first syntax?

    *[4]*FooType

The first is or could be Haskell. The length of a list is not part of its type. The second looks like Java, ditto there (although built-in arrays have a different syntax).

Haskell does not have mutability at all and thus no "pointers". In Java the insides of containers are mutable so you'd have to add an outer array or list. In either case though you don't need pointers to simply pass things around as you do in C (I don't know about Go).

Where do your examples say they're pointers?

They don't, it's inferred in my examples. Like I said, if you need them, you can use whatever sigils you want. They can go in front of the types as usual.

How would you express this using your first syntax?

I wouldn't. That syntax is decidedly inappropriate for vectors that incorporate length into the type.

You could have something like * [* FooType#4]

Your best bet with code in comments is to indent:

  var foo *[]*FooType

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

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