[pansa2]

> It is an explicit goal of the go team to minimize the number of keywords in the language.

It's understandable - because unfortunately people judge languages by very shallow metrics. Several times I've seen people use "number of keywords" as a proxy for language complexity.

However, that's completely misguided. `static` in C++ (and, IMO, `for` in Go) demonstrate that overloading a keyword to mean multiple things is harder to understand than having a larger number of more meaningful keywords.

[weinzierl]

I (still) find it confusing that in C++ the symbols to declare a pointer and a reference are the same as the ones for dereference and address-of.

That pointers declared with * in Go are more like references (&) and that there are no true pointers (I think) does not really help.

[pjmlp]

Go has true pointers.

If you mean pointers arithmetic, that can be achieved with unsafe package.

[weinzierl]

From my vantage, pointers without arithmetic are typically called references, as opposed to "true" pointers. I did not mean it in a derogatory way, both have their place and Go is a great language even (or maybe despite) without what I would call "true" pointers.

[pjmlp]

From CS point of view, references are pointers that you can't get the underlying value behind them.

Being able to do arithmetic is orthogonal to that.

In fact check a language like D, C#, Swift, with references, pointers, and pointers with arithmetic.

[trealira]

The fact that, in Go, you can have pointers to pointers, and reassign pointer variables like any other, would imply, IMO, that pointers are first-class values, and so they are true pointers, even without being able to pointer arithmetic with them.

[dingnuts]

how is for overloaded? in other languages you can just do for (;;) { which is the same; while is a redundant keyword