Variables and Types

Part of the Go course

In the last lesson you printed a fixed piece of text. Real programs need to remember things that change: a customer's name, a price, whether a checkbox is ticked. A variable is a name that stands in for a value stored in memory, so your code can refer to "the price" instead of retyping 4.50 everywhere.

Imagine you are filling out a form: one box for a name, one for an age. A variable declaration is that same idea in code, a labeled box that holds one value. Inside a function, the shortest way to create one is the := operator, read as "declare and assign" ...