Behaviour of increment and decrement operators in Python
I notice that a pre-increment/decrement operator can be applied on a variable (like ++count ). It compiles, but it does not actually change the value of the variable!
What is the behavior of the pre-increment/decrement operators (++/--) in Python?
Why does Python deviate from the behavior of these operators seen in C/C++?
++ is not an operator. It is two + operators. The + operator is the identity operator, which does nothing. (Clarification: the + and - unary operators only work on numbers, but I presume that you wouldn't expect a hypothetical ++ operator to work on strings.)
++count
Parses as
+(+count)
Which translates to
count
You have to use the slightly longer += operator to do what you want to do:
count += 1
I suspect the ++ and -- operators were left out for consistency and simplicity. I don't know the exact argument Guido van Rossum gave for the decision, but I can imagine a few arguments:
++count is ambiguous, as it could be + , + , count (two unary + operators) just as easily as it could be ++ , count (one unary ++ operator). It's not a significant syntactic ambiguity, but it does exist. ++ is nothing more than a synonym for += 1 . It was a shorthand invented because C compilers were stupid and didn't know how to optimize a += 1 into the inc instruction most computers have. In this day of optimizing compilers and bytecode interpreted languages, adding operators to a language to allow programmers to optimize their code is usually frowned upon, especially in a language like Python that is designed to be consistent and readable. ++ operators is mixing up the differences (both in precedence and in return value) between the pre- and post-incremend/decrement operators, and Python likes to eliminate language "gotcha"-s. The precedence issues of pre-/post-increment in C are pretty hairy, and incredibly easy to mess up. When you want to increment or decrement, you typically want to do that on an integer. Like so:
b++
But in Python, integers are immutable . That is you can't change them. This is because the integer objects can be used under several names. Try this:
>>> b = 5
>>> a = 5
>>> id(a)
162334512
>>> id(b)
162334512
>>> a is b
True
a and b above are actually the same object. If you incremented a, you would also increment b. That's not what you want. So you have to reassign. Like this:
b = b + 1
Or simpler:
b += 1
Which will reassign b to b+1 . That is not an increment operator, because it does not increment b , it reassigns it.
In short: Python behaves differently here, because it is not C, and is not a low level wrapper around machine code, but a high-level dynamic language, where increments don't make sense, and also are not as necessary as in C, where you use them every time you have a loop, for example.
While the others answers are correct in so far as they show what a mere + usually does (namely, leave the number as it is, if it is one), they are incomplete in so far as they don't explain what happens.
To be exact, +x evaluates to x.__pos__() and ++x to x.__pos__().__pos__() .
I could imagine a VERY weird class structure (Children, don't do this at home!) like this:
class ValueKeeper(object):
def __init__(self, value): self.value = value
def __str__(self): return str(self.value)
class A(ValueKeeper):
def __pos__(self):
print 'called A.__pos__'
return B(self.value - 3)
class B(ValueKeeper):
def __pos__(self):
print 'called B.__pos__'
return A(self.value + 19)
x = A(430)
print x, type(x)
print +x, type(+x)
print ++x, type(++x)
print +++x, type(+++x)
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