this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Yes, worse, because now if you want to use the underscore assignment to indicate that you really want to discard that variable - it gets confused with underscore assignments that were put there "temporarily" for experimentation purpose.
Exactly.
Say I'm having some issue with a function. I comment out half the function to see if that's where the weirdness is. Golang says "unused variable, I refuse to compile this dogshit!" I completely fool Golang by just using
_ = foo. Yes, I was correct, that's where the problem was. I rewrite that section of the code, and test it out, things work perfectly. Only now, it turns out I'm not usingfooanymore, and Golang has no idea because I so cleverly fooled it with_ = foo.Now, something that could be caught by a linter and expressed as a warning is missed by the language police entirely, and may make it into production code.
Police the code that people put into a repository / share with others. Don't police the code that people just want to test on their own.