[fpc-pascal] ++ and --

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Tomas Hajny wrote:
> On Tue, July 30, 2013 17:03, Timothy Groves wrote:
>> FPC offers the +=, -=, etc., statements swiped from C.  Is there any
>> reason why ++ and -- are not similarly supported?  I know that we have
>> inc() and dec(), but I'd say that ++ and -- are easier to type.
> 
> General side note with no intention to start discussion about superiority
> of one language to another: A lot of C constructs is easier to type than
> their Pascal equivalents but not necessarily even equally easy to read.

Seconded.

> Now specifically to your question - I believe that one of the reasons may
> be the fact that Pascal does not support unary arithmetic operators in
> postfix notation. The fact that C allows using them with both prefix and
> postfix notation makes them even more difficult from my point of view
> because potentially allowing them only in one of the notations known from
> other languages would immediately trigger users to ask why only one of
> possible notations (common elsewhere) is supported and the other not.

I've got a vague recollection that some of the ++ and -- semantics are 
particularly unpleasant, and that one of the C inventors did his best to 
disown them. At least += etc. are fairly unambiguous: they're almost 
macro expansions and as such they don't mandate any extra overloadable 
operators etc.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]