Avoid too much conversion

Question

I have some parts in my current Go code that look like this:

i := int(math.Floor(float64(len(l)/4)))

The verbosity seems necessary because of some function type signatures like the one in math.Floor, but can it be simplified?

Answer 1

In general, the strict typing of Go leads to some verbose expressions. Verbose doesn't mean stuttering though. Type conversions do useful things and it's valuable to have those useful things explicitly stated.

The trick to simplification is to not write unneeded type conversions, and for that you need to refer to documentation such as the language definition.

In your specific case, you need to know that len() returns int, and further, a value >= 0. You need to know that 4 is a constant that will take on the type int in this expression, and you need to know that integer division will return the integer quotient, which in this case will be a non-negative int and in fact exactly the answer you want.

i := len(l)/4

This case is an easy one.