Change values while iterating

No, the abbreviation you want is not possible.

The reason for this is that range copies the values from the slice you’re iterating over.
The specification about range says:

Range expression                          1st value             2nd value (if 2nd variable is present)
array or slice  a   [n]E, *[n]E, or []E   index    i  int       a[i]       E

So, range uses a[i] as its second value for arrays/slices, which effectively means that the
value is copied, making the original value untouchable.

This behavior is demonstrated by the following code:

x := make([]int, 3)

x[0], x[1], x[2] = 1, 2, 3

for i, val := range x {
    println(&x[i], "vs.", &val)
}

The code prints you completely different memory locations for the value from range and the actual
value in the slice:

0xf84000f010 vs. 0x7f095ed0bf68
0xf84000f014 vs. 0x7f095ed0bf68
0xf84000f018 vs. 0x7f095ed0bf68

So the only thing you can do is to either use pointers or the index, as already proposed by jnml and peterSO.