what is the “less than followed by dash” operator in go language?

Question

What is the <- operator in go language? Have seen this in many code snippets related to Go but what is the meaning of it?

Answer 1

<- is used in more than one place in the language specification:

Channel types:

The <- operator specifies the channel direction, send or receive. If no direction is given, the channel is bi-directional. A channel may be constrained only to send or only to receive by conversion or assignment.

Receive operator:

For an operand ch of channel type, the value of the receive operation <-ch is the value received from the channel ch. The type of the value is the element type of the channel. The expression blocks until a value is available. Receiving from a nil channel blocks forever. Receiving from a closed channel always succeeds, immediately returning the element type's zero value.

Send statements:

A send statement sends a value on a channel. The channel expression must be of channel type and the type of the value must be assignable to the channel's element type.

SendStmt = Channel "<-" Expression .
Channel  = Expression .

The receive operator is also a fundamental part of the select statement