Well, you could, using unsafe. But you also couldn't write the index operator (without unsafe), and I don't think anyone would call that "magic". And in either case that has nothing to do with its treatment of nil.
It would be more magic if it somehow updated a hidden pointer, like maps do. (And this has also been my experience teaching Go, people grasp quickly that slice length/cap is immutable but often forget that non-nil maps are mutable and always "by reference".)
It would be more magic if it somehow updated a hidden pointer, like maps do. (And this has also been my experience teaching Go, people grasp quickly that slice length/cap is immutable but often forget that non-nil maps are mutable and always "by reference".)