I have spent a bit of time attempting to do this, and I think I need a global array (not slice), and I want to pass it as a pointer, not by value. The function receiving the pointer needs to test for nil, and if nil, read the array from disk, using eg: "baForm, oOserr = ioutil.ReadFile(sFormName)". The calling function may pass either a global array or an array local to the calling function which I presume will be garbage collected.
The reason for doing this is that I want a standard function to read the forms from disk, and often-used forms are stored globally. Despite whether some may think there is a better way, I still want to know how to achieve this ie: a) have global or local array, b) not pass by value, c) The global arrays will be read only once from disk and the local arrays will be read each time the function is called. TIA.