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NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 09:35:09 -0500
Date: Thu, 19 May 2011 07:35:08 -0700
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
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Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Why would one use += 1 at the place of ++?
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On 5/19/2011 5:03 AM, Eric Sosman wrote:
> On 5/19/2011 6:40 AM, David Lamb wrote:
>> [...]
>> I think ++ exists only because the hardware on which C was developed had
>> an addressing mode that did it atomically in the very special case of
>> referring to
>> something = array[index++];
>
> FWIW, some guy named Dennis Ritchie says this is not true.
>
> "People often guess that [++ and --]were created to use the
> auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided
> by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular.
> This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11
> when B was developed."
>
> "B" is the language from which C inherited ++ and --, and much else.
>

There seem to me to be two reasons for the ++ and -- operators in C.
Typing was slow and inconvenient when C was invented, so there was a
motivation to make code terse. C made extensive use of macros that could
represent expressions but not statements, so much was done as side effects.

I do not understand why those operators exist in Java. They cannot be
used without going against style advice in the JLS and Java is not a
terse language.

Patricia