2.09.md

2.09 Conversion, Not Casting

Conversion means we take the value of one type and convert it to another type.

Let's try it out in the Go playground

package main

import (
	"fmt"
)

var a int
type hotdog int
var b hotdog

func main() {
	a = 42
	b = hotdog(a)  // we can convert the value of a to a value of type hotdog
	fmt.Println(a)
	fmt.Printf("%T\n", a)
	fmt.Println(b)
	fmt.Printf("%T\n", b)
}

In other programming languages, this is called casting. We don't call it casting in Go, we call it conversion. If you go to Effective Go and search for "cast" you won't find any results, but if you search for "conversion" you will.

That's the end of this section! We will have some hands on exercises in the next section.