Picture being in class and taking part in a lesson. When we hear an important detail, we write it down in our notebook for reference later. This same idea of storing important information somewhere is the reason why we declare variables in Go. But instead of writing information down in a notebook, a computer sets aside some space in its memory to store the value. The space that the computer allocates is called an address. Each address is marked as a unique numerical value.

Every time we use a variable, what we’re doing is retrieving the value stored at the variable’s address. Here’s a simple visualization:

To find a variable’s address we use the & operator followed by the variable name, like so:

x := "My very first address"
fmt.Println(&x) // Prints 0x414020

When we see the 0x prefix, this means that the number is in formatted in hexadecimal, which is a way of representing 16 digit numbers. Thus, the 0x414020 is actually the address of x in hexadecimal format.

Let’s print out the address of a variable for ourselves.