3 dots in 4 places

yourbasic.org/golang

Can you name four places where three dots (...) are used in Go?

Variadic function parameters

If the last parameter of a function has type ...T, it can be called with any number of trailing arguments of type T. The actual type of ...T inside the function is []T.

This example function can be called with, for instance, Sum(1, 2, 3) or Sum().

func Sum(nums ...int) int {
	res := 0
	for _, n := range nums {
		res += n
	}
	return res
}

Arguments to variadic functions

You can pass a slice s directly to a variadic function if you unpack it with the s... notation. In this case no new slice is created.

In this example, we pass a slice to the Sum function.

primes := []int{2, 3, 5, 7}
fmt.Println(Sum(primes...)) // 17

Array literals

In an array literal, the ... notation specifies a length equal to the number of elements in the literal.

stooges := [...]string{"Moe", "Larry", "Curly"} // len(stooges) == 3

The go command

Three dots are used by the go command as a wildcard when describing package lists.

This command tests all packages in the current directory and its subdirectories.

$ go test ./...

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