[dilap]

> To programmers from other languages, such as C or C++, the concept of pointers to dynamically extensible arrays seems like a perfectly decent idea that surely should exist and work in Go.

Ah, I would beg to differ!

You should never be taking pointers to a dynamically resizable array, in any language. (Well, caveat, its fine if you do it only for a time period where you know the array won't be growing.) The whole point of a dynamically resizable array is that its addresses can change!

If you did this in C++, you'd get undefined behavior. In Go you get "safe" but probably-not-what-you-wanted behavior. In Rust it simply wouldn't be possible (w/o unsafe), and you'd have to use indices (which is the correct thing to do, in any language).