As someone who programs in Go a lot these days, that line (I assume you meant the first curly to be { and not }) looks less obviously wrong than it would have i

As someone who programs in Go a lot these days, that line (I assume you meant the first curly to be { and not }) looks less obviously wrong than it would have in the past when I did more C/C++ programming. Because I've gotten used to Go's support for short assignment in an if, the semi doesn't look completely out of place there (though the construction here is not valid Go either).