I see that as a strength of Go, that it lets you cherry-pick the packages you want to import and make available, so you only get what you want/need. This is goo

I see that as a strength of Go, that it lets you cherry-pick the packages you want to import and make available, so you only get what you want/need. This is good for many reasons. 99% of my projects don't use "fmt" nor "strings", but they may use packages that use "fmt" internally. Reading the contents of a file into a string is this easy for me: package main import . "gist.github.com/5571468.git" // [1] func main() { s := MustReadFile("foo.txt") print(s) } Finally, canonical Go code typically has function names like ReadLine [2] rather than rdLn. Where are you getting that from? [1] https://gist.github.com/shurcooL/5571468 https://gist.github.com/shurcooL/5571468 [2] http://golang.org/pkg/bufio/#Reader.ReadLine http://golang.org/pkg/bufio/#Reader.ReadLine