Changing the docs is fine now, but if you want to change the behavior, this has to wait for 1.9 at this point.

but the current implementation behaves differently

What is the current behavior you see?

Our standard bug report template has a section "What did you expect to see?" and "What did you see instead?". If you're not going to use the template, at least include all the relevant information.

"What did you expect to see?"

It's hard to describe to me because I'm not sure whether the behavior must be the same and what's the expected behavior by the original author. The observable things are the following:

• The testing package mentions nothing about no text after "Output:",
• The cmd/go package says that no text after "Output:" never executes examples,
• Running cmd/go test with an example containing no text after "Output:" executes the example.

Examples with no output comment are compiled but not executed (which is correct):

package foo_test

import "fmt"

func ExampleReverse() {
	fmt.Println("hello")
}

Examples with no text after //Output: behave differently from what go doc cmd/go says. The following:

package foo_test

import "fmt"

func ExampleReverse() {
	fmt.Println("hello")
	//Output:
}

is compiled and executed, both on go1.7.3 and on tip (and it fails at run-time because the output is not empty).

Note that rsc asked for an example with no text after //Output: to be actually run. This was Issue #4485.

It looks like it's the documentation that is outdated(?). We actually want to run Examples with no text after //Output:, and check that there's, in fact, no output.

The issue was fixed in https://codereview.appspot.com/7071050 but the author forgot to update the documentation.

Nice, thanks for the investigation, @ALTree.

I sent https://golang.org/cl/34512 (for 1.8 or 1.9, you decide).

CL https://golang.org/cl/34512 mentions this issue.