[_ph_]

Sorry, but those "defects" are perhaps a minor inconvenience as they require a bit more of typing, but don't prevent you to write code. While I agree that one would prefer to have less inconveniences - and part of the design of Go tries to eleminate especially those - I strongly prefer them for the overall better safety of Pascal and its sucessors to the C language family. Unfortunately, too many programmers saw this like you and we ended up at todays mess.