The Go Language – basic data types – Part 3

by Prasham Sabadra · May 7, 2022

Exploring Go basic types

Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!!

We are continuing series on Go lang. In following two previous articles we discussed about – introduction to Go and wrote our first simple Go program

In this article we will move ahead and will discuss basic data types in Go

Take away from this article

Understand the basic data types in Go – Integers, Floating-point numbers, Booleans
Exploring new package – math

Following are the basic data types Go supports

Integers
Floating-point numbers
Complex numbers
Booleans
Strings

In this article we will discuss – Integers, Floating-point numbers and Booleans.

For Strings and Complex numbers we will have separate articles

Integers

Go supports both – signed and unsigned integers
Following integer types are supported

uint8

uint16

uint32

uint64

int8

int16

int32

int64

Table 1 : Starting with Go – Basic data types – Integers

Actually we mostly just use int and uint
Size of int and uint mostly depends on compiler based on the hardware
Examples – declaring variables of type integers
- var intCounter int
- var intCounter, intResult int
- var intCounter = 10
- intCoutnter :=10
- intCounter, intResult := 10,10
If any value is not assigned to integer variables then default value will be ZERO (0)
Regarding reminder (%) operator for integers:
- In Go reminder operator is only applied for integers
- Also, sign of reminder operator is always same as sign of dividend – -11/2 = -1 and also -11/-2 = -1

package main

//importing required packages
import (
	"fmt"
)

//main function
func main() {
	//declaring variables
	var dividend = -11
	var dividor = 2

	var reminderVal = dividend % dividor

	fmt.Println("Respective reminder value is", reminderVal)
}

Exploring Go basic types - Integer types - demonstration of reminder operator — fig : Exploring Go basic types – Integer types – demonstration of reminder operator

Float Types

Following float types are supported

float32

float64

complex64

complex128

Table 2 : Starting with Go – Basic data types – Float

Finding maximum limit of float types – we can use “math” package to know the maximum limit of float32 and float64 types – below is the simple program

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"math"
)

func main() {

	//Getting max limit of float32 type
	var maxfloat32limit = math.MaxFloat32

	//Getting max limit of float64 type
	var maxfloat64limit = math.MaxFloat64

	fmt.Println("Max limit of Float32 is ", maxfloat32limit)
	fmt.Println("Max limit of Float64 is ", maxfloat64limit)
}