Hey there!

I'm new to Go (I just started yesterday), but Boots is helping me take to it quite quickly, so thank you for that!

Something I noticed in Ch. 1, Lesson 21 was that the bear emoji is used as a number held as a string, even though a rune's type is int32, making me initially think it was a little funny to say that an int a string.

I understand it now after completing the lesion and going back to talk to Boots and figuring out that it was the same as when we say that: something := "17"

I'll paste our talk at the end of this message, I just thought you'd like add a note about that somewhere in these early lessons. It makes a lot of sense but it could be helpful to new folks to specify.

Cheers and thanks for everything!
-Max

P.S. (Boots Chat)

Max: why is the emoji in the solution a string? Aren't runes a int32?

Boots: Adjusts spectacles wisely

Ah, an excellent observation! Let me clarify this mystical distinction:

You're absolutely right that a rune is an alias for int32 in Go. However, when we write "🐻" in our code, we're actually creating a string literal that contains a single rune.

Think of it this way:

A rune is indeed a single Unicode code point (int32)
A string is a sequence of bytes that can encode one or more runes
When we write const name = "🐻", we're creating a string that happens to contain just one rune
If we wanted to work with the actual rune value, we could do something like:

var bearRune rune = '🐻' // Note the single quotes for a rune literal

Would you like to experiment with the difference between string and rune literals? We could try printing out the actual numeric value of the bear emoji as a rune!

Max: Oh! So it's like saying name := "17" or some other number

Boots: Nods approvingly

Exactly! You've grasped an important concept there. Just like "17" is a string containing the characters '1' and '7' (not the numeric value 17), "🐻" is a string containing the bear emoji character.

To break it down:

number := "17" // string containing two runes: '1' and '7'
bear := "🐻" // string containing one rune: '🐻'
actualNum := 17 // numeric integer value
actualBear := '🐻' // numeric rune value (something like 128059 in decimal)

In both cases, the quoted version ("...") gives us a string, while the unquoted number or single-quoted character ('...') gives us the actual numeric value.

Clever connection you made there! Would you like to explore how we could convert between these different representations?

Max: Can you tell the dev team about our conversation please?

Boots:

Adjusts wizard hat and chuckles warmly

As a teaching assistant, I can't actually reach out to the dev team. However, if you think this distinction between runes and strings would be helpful to clarify in the lesson materials, you can:

Open an issue on Boot.dev's GitHub repository
Reach out to Lane and the team on Discord
Share your feedback through the Boot.dev platform

Your insight about comparing "🐻" to "17" was quite clever, and it might help other students understand the concept better too!