much ado about nothing
Remove the ++ and –- operators
111–120 of 249 posts
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#112FTA:
Advantages: "The primary advantage of these operators is their expressive capability"
Disadvantages: "Their expressive advantage is minimal"
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#113I had no idea there was even a debate about this let alone people passionate about each side. This is bike shedding right?
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#114I strongly disagree with this. Being able to do a very simple task like increment or decrement a number inline is useful and reduces clutter and I've always found the idea that the operator complicates things ridiculous. The way they work has always been obvious to me since I first learned to program in PHP as a tween.
Almost every C and C++ book I've seen has an, imho, needless chapter on why "y = x++" and "y = ++x" are not the same thing. This does not reduce clutter.
Public service announcement: If you can't keep this stuff straight, C++ may not be for you.
Edit: I'm only half-joking. Removing postincrement and postdecrement from C++, as some people are suggesting, would be like removing the oil filler cap from a chain saw. The tool would still be dangerous to use, but now it's annoying to use as well.
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. C++? You can overload operators, but define your own? I must have missed something.
Each language will have a different meaning of what exactly it means to "define your own". C++ restricts which symbols may be operators, but, you can "define your own +".
In practice it's very useful to distinguish between a language which "just" has operator overloading vs a language that allows custom user-defined symbolic operators. The existence of the latter is actually one of the few complaints that I have about Swift so far, but I'm sure many people will ardently disagree with me here. :P
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#116Removing ++ et al: ok, they have their problems. But retaining x += 1? That one has always annoyed me. Why does '+' (and friends) get this special form, but not my functions? Just because they're built-in. They are useful; no argument there. Largely because 'x' can be a complex reference, and you don't have to type it twice (and the compiler doesn't have to figure out that its the same expression twice). E.g. x=x+1 i…
Perl6 lets you define your own operators [0]. I haven't seen them used enough to know how it affects code readability, though.
[0] http://doc.perl6.org/language/functions#Defining_Operators
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#117> Their expressive advantage is minimal - x++ is not much shorter than x += 1 Personal opinion, but I definitely miss '++' every time I'm doing '+=' in Python.
I did miss it too, for the first 2 weeks I started using python. After that it just seems ugly.
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#118Removing ++ et al: ok, they have their problems. But retaining x += 1? That one has always annoyed me. Why does '+' (and friends) get this special form, but not my functions? Just because they're built-in. They are useful; no argument there. Largely because 'x' can be a complex reference, and you don't have to type it twice (and the compiler doesn't have to figure out that its the same expression twice). E.g. x=x+1 i…
Or akin to PHP's pass-by-reference ampersand, you could have something like `&x + 1` which would expand to `x = x + 1`. Dunno what the impact on code readability/maintainability would be, but it does sound nice.
Especially when doing straightforward data manipulations in R or Python, endless lines of `bla = map(bla, fn)` start to look crufty, so much so that Pandas in Python now allows you to add `inplace=True` to almost any data manipulation method to cut down on the verbosity. But then, sprinkling that keyword argument across every line isn't exactly better. Neither is endless chaining. Looks like we could still use some syntactic improvement.
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
i++ is different from i += 1 in this way: += could be i += 2 or i += j or something else. I have to pay attention to be sure. But i++ can only add one.
Yes, you actually have to read the statement `i += 1` in order to know what it does. I don't see how that is an argument. It's barely longer than `i++`, in any case. I could buy the argument if we were dealing with indexes or numbers where you had to read/hunt down occurrences of them to make sure they are what you expect. Like: make sure that a loop with a lot of indexes don't overincrement (out of bounds) or does s…
But the point is that with ++, I don't have to look at all at the increment - I know what it is. The issue isn't how far away I have to look, it's that I have to look at all. (Or I don't look, and just assume that it's an add-one because that's what it always is, and then wonder why my loop doesn't work right.)
Re: Remove the ++ and –- operators
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you actually have to read the statement `i += 1` in order to know what it does. I don't see how that is an argument. It's barely longer than `i++`, in any case. I could buy the argument if we were dealing with indexes or numbers where you had to read/hunt down occurrences of them to make sure they are what you expect. Like: make sure that a loop with a lot of indexes don't overincrement (out of bounds) or does s…
But the point is that with ++, I don't have to look at all at the increment - I know what it is. The issue isn't how far away I have to look, it's that I have to look at all . (Or I don't look, and just assume that it's an add-one because that's what it always is, and then wonder why my loop doesn't work right.)
> the point is that with ++, I don't have to look at all at the increment
Of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't know it was an increment in the first place.