Question

I don’t quite understand the specific purpose of short assignments,

why do this:

x:= 10

when this is also possible:

var x = 10

Is there any specific use case where short assignments are more convenient
Thanks

Answer 1

if x, err := fn(); err != nil {
    // do something
}

In the above case, the variables are confined within the if statement. If you try to access err outside of the if statement, it won’t be available. Likewise for x. There’s various cases where maintaining scope like this might be useful, but I’d say the use of := is for given styles like the above with if, switch, for.

For some additional background, var also allows grouping, much like using import.

var (
    y = 1
    z = 2
)

which pushes the use-cases for var vs := further apart.