go/types says x.go:4:5: expected boolean expression, found assignment (missing parentheses around composite literal?). Note that column 5 is the beginning of the conjunction.

I would like to have a look on this issue.
Could you confirm, the error message with go/types seems more relevant and would be the solution to use in go tool compile

I thought the original error message was pretty good. It is just being applied too broadly. It should read something like:

syntax error: assignment b = "b" used as value

And have its location be that of b = “b”, not of the entire conjunction.

It seems that the parser think the LHS of assignment is a == "a" && b and the RHS is b.

@josharian This is probably a simple fix for binary op:

diff --git a/src/cmd/compile/internal/syntax/parser.go b/src/cmd/compile/internal/syntax/parser.go
index f3c2c60ec8..ae26c4a396 100644
--- a/src/cmd/compile/internal/syntax/parser.go
+++ b/src/cmd/compile/internal/syntax/parser.go
@@ -1888,7 +1888,12 @@ done:
                // further confusion.
                str := String(s)
                if as, ok := s.(*AssignStmt); ok && as.Op == 0 {
-                       str = "assignment " + str
+                       prefix := "assignment "
+                       if lhs, ok := as.Lhs.(*Operation); ok && lhs.Y != nil {
+                               as.Lhs = lhs.Y
+                               str = String(as)
+                       }
+                       str = prefix + str
                }
                p.syntaxError(fmt.Sprintf("%s used as value", str))
        }

not sure it's applied for unary op or not 🤔

I don’t know much about the parser. Maybe mail that as a CL and discuss with mdempsky or gri? In any case it is easier to discuss diffs in a CL.

It seems that "help wanted" is no more required. I let Cuonlm finalize the fix.

Related #23385

Should we fix this @griesemer ?

@cuonglm It would be nice to fix this as it is probably a common typo. But at the same time it's subtle to get it right w/o going overboard. Your tentative patch seems reasonable. How about just highlighting the LHS and RHS of the assignment better with parentheses? For instance if the error message were:

syntax error: assignment (a == "a" && b) = "b" used as value

That is, we put parentheses around expressions if they are complex? (Needless to say that this is not even a valid assignment, but I don't think it's worthwhile spending code on figuring this out in the parser.)

Even simpler, maybe it is good enough to take the current approach and just syntaxErrorAt and use the position of the = (which is the assignment's Pos()). I would probably start with that and see how it goes.

@cuonglm I assigned myself to this just so I can keep track of it. Feel free to go ahead for now.

Change https://golang.org/cl/218337 mentions this issue: cmd/compile/internal/syntax: better error when an assignment is used in value context

@cuonglm Since I was already investigating this a bit more, I just sent out at CL.