This was a design chose to minimize the number of keywords in the language.
> The rationale is pretty simple: Only identifiers that must be keywords for syntactic reasons are keywords.
> In fact, in the very beginning there was some discussion as to whether things like nil, iota, etc. should be keywords. Eventually we agreed on the rule above which settled it.
> The rationale is pretty simple: Only identifiers that must be keywords for syntactic reasons are keywords.
> In fact, in the very beginning there was some discussion as to whether things like nil, iota, etc. should be keywords. Eventually we agreed on the rule above which settled it.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18193#issuecomment-26492...