Why Can't You Get the Address of a Constant in Go?

Finding the Address of Constants in Go

In Go, constants represent immutable values and cannot be assigned an address, unlike variables. This restriction ensures the integrity of constant data and prevents unintended modifications.

The error message displayed when attempting to take the address of a constant in Go, as shown in the code snippet you provided, is:

cannot take the address of k

According to the Go specification, the addressable operands for the address operator (&) include variables, pointer indirections, slice indexing operations, field selectors of addressable structs, array indexing operations of addressable arrays, and composite literals. Constants are explicitly excluded from this list.

There are two primary reasons why constants cannot have addresses:

1. Constants may not have a physical address in memory.
2. Constants, even if stored in memory, need to remain immutable. Assigning the address of a constant to a variable would allow for potential modifications, violating the immutable nature of constants.

If you need a pointer to a value that is equal to a constant, consider assigning the constant's value to a variable and then taking the address of the variable. This approach ensures that the value remains constant while allowing you to access and modify the variable's address as needed.

The above is the detailed content of Why Can't You Get the Address of a Constant in Go?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!