Go has 4 common kinds of literals and a more rare one for complex numbers.
Types of literals
Integer literals
Sequence of numbers.
Base 10 by default, but can be changed with prefixes:
0bfor binary (base 2)0ofor octal (base 8). Can also be represented with0(no letter), but it’s not recommended to use it as it is very confusing.0xfor hexadecimal (base 16).
Underscores _ can be used in the middle of integer literals that have no effect on the literal value to improve readability. This allows to group, for example, by thousands (1_234) in base 10 or beak up at 1-, 2- or 4-byte boundaries for other bases. Can’t be used at the start or beginning of the literal. Can’t be placed next to each other (__).
Floating-point literals
Has a decimal point to indicate a fractional portion of the value
Can have an exponent with the letter e with a positive/negative number, e.g. 6.03e23.
Hexadecimal literals can be written with 0x prefix and the letter p for exponent, e.g. 0x12.34p5 (equals 582.5 in base 10).
Underscores can be used as well.
Imaginary literals for complex numbers
Same as floating-point literals but have an i suffix: 36.62i
Rune literals
Characters in single quotes.
'a'- Unicode character'\141'- 8-bit octal number'\x61'- 8-bit hexadecimal number'\u0061'- 16-bit hexadecimal number'\U0000006'- 32-bit Unicode number- and some backslash-escaped rune literals like new-line
'\n', tab'\t', single quote'\'', backslash'\\'
String literals
Interpreted string literals are indicated with double quotes. They are called “interpreted” because they interpret rune literals inside, e.g. "Greetings and\n\"Salutations\""
Raw string literals are indicated with backquotes/backticks. They can contain any character except a backquote. They don’t have any escape characters, and all characters are included as is, including newlines. So it’s possible to write multiline strings like that:
`Greetings and
"Salutations"`Literals are untyped
Go uses the default type for a literal; if there’s nothing in the expression that makes clear what the type of the literal is, the literal defaults to a type.
var x float64 = 10
var y float64 = 200.3 * 5