You can only assign to something which is addressable in the sense of
https://golang.org/ref/spec#Address_operators.
That is: "either a variable, pointer indirection, or slice indexing
operation; or a field selector of an addressable struct operand; or an
array indexing operation of an addressable array."
You want "a field selector of an addressable struct operand", but the
return value of a function is not addressable (it's not a variable,
pointer, etc etc).
By contrast, in the case where your function returns a pointer, then the
struct is the result of a pointer indirection (so it's addressable) and the
field selection is thus addressable too.
Thomas
On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 5:41 PM Orson Cart <objectivedynam...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> I'm a newbie to Go having used C and C++ in the past and I'm puzzled about
> something I've just seen.
>
> In the following code getEmployee returns a pointer to a struct. The
> return value is then dereferenced. This code compiles and runs fine:
>
> package main
>
> type employee struct {
> ID int
> name string
> }
>
> var dilbert employee
>
> func main() {
>
> getEmployee().name = "dilbert"
> }
>
> func getEmployee() *employee {
> return &dilbert
> }
>
> However if I modify getEmployee as follows, I get a compilation error:
>
> func getEmployee() employee {
> return dilbert
> }
>
> The error is: cannot assign to getEmployee().name
>
> I assume that it revolves around "assignability" but I'm struggling to
> understand why.
>
> Can anyone tell me why this is?
>
> TIA,
> Orson
>
>
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