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Golang Keywords

By IncludeHelp Last updated : December 8, 2023

What are keywords in Go Language?

Keywords are reserved words whose meanings are pre-defined in the compiler and we cannot change their meaning. Keywords can also not be used for any other purpose like using them as identifiers. If we use keywords as the identifier, this will generate an error.

List of Golang keywords

There are 25 keywords in Golang, they are:

break	case	chan	const	continue
default	defer	else	fallthrough	for
func	go	goto	if	import
interface	map	package	range	return
select	struct	switch	type	var

Example of Golang Keywords

Consider the below program,

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

func main() {
	var name = "Alex"
	fmt.Println("Hey! My name is", name)
}

Output

Hey! My name is Alex

In the above program, the keywords are: package, import, func, and var.

What happens if we use a keyword as an identifier?

If we use a keyword as an identifier in Golang (and, other programming languages also), the program troughs an error.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

func main() {
	// Here, we are using keyword "range"
	// as an identifier (i.e., variable name)
	var range = "Alex"
	fmt.Println("Hey! My name is", range)
}

Output

./prog.go:10:6: syntax error: unexpected range, expecting name
./prog.go:11:33: syntax error: unexpected range, expecting expression

In the program, we are using the keyword range as a variable name to store a string and the result is a syntax error.