"I understand what a pointer is," What are you trying to do, and how would you think it works in your examples? I assume you're trying to change the name of th

"I understand what a pointer is," What are you trying to do, and how would you think it works in your examples? I assume you're trying to change the name of the object being pointed to, but you're just assigning a new value to a variable that is passed to a function. Therefore, when the function returns, that value is 'lost'. How could it ever change the value of a member of the object you're pointing to? I have never written a line of Go in my life, but with the knowledge that Go supports some form of pointers, it's quite easy to trace this back to how it would work in C or C++; it also wouldn't work there, either. Knowing what a pointer is is easy, it's just memorizing a definition - knowing how they work takes some experience.