> 'type Foo int' in Go creates a new 'Foo' type that can't be used as an int without casting (although you can assign an int to it). You can't, in fact: t

> 'type Foo int' in Go creates a new 'Foo' type that can't be used as an int without casting (although you can assign an int to it). You can't, in fact: type Foo int func main() { var foo Foo = 1 var bar int = 2 foo = bar // cannot use bar (variable of type int) as Foo value in assignment } The reason you can do things like: var foo Foo = 1 is that because numeric literals in Go are not ints, they are untyped [0]. [0] https://go.dev/blog/constants https://go.dev/blog/constants