notwithstanding keyword

Question

What does the notwithstanding keyword mean in Google Go?

Answer 1

2017 Update: There was a major parser update and the new one no longer seems to support these Easter egg words.

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Looks like an easter egg in the lexer to me:

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/08e25fc1ba397e02ec776561ed73b7f9a8b94392/src/cmd/compile/internal/gc/lex.go#L2152-L2156

the relevant section is the symbol table:

"notwithstanding",      LIGNORE,    Txxx,       OXXX,
"thetruthofthematter",  LIGNORE,    Txxx,       OXXX,
"despiteallobjections", LIGNORE,    Txxx,       OXXX,
"whereas",              LIGNORE,    Txxx,       OXXX,
"insofaras",            LIGNORE,    Txxx,       OXXX,

I guess they could be used to test handling of the lexical type LIGNORE, but there doesn't seem to be any "real" ignored tokens.

Answer 2

The Go Programming Language Specification does not include the keyword 'notwithstanding'.