Those changes would break existing code, so I don't think they'll go for that. I'm slightly hopeful that whatever Go 2 does for error handling will dodge this i

Those changes would break existing code, so I don't think they'll go for that. I'm slightly hopeful that whatever Go 2 does for error handling will dodge this issue by not making you declare and re-use the `err` variable, but I don't remember enough about that proposal to tell if it would actually help. In general, the trend of making things easier for the compiler rather than the developer is a thing that annoys me about go, you're right to point that out