From: "Aleksi Niemelä" <aleksi.niemela@...>
Date: 2000-05-10T17:26:20+02:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:02711] Re: X++?

In message "[ruby-talk:02706] X++?"
    on 00/05/10, Aleksi Niemel� <aleksi.niemela@cinnober.com> writes:

>|I got an idea from
http://www.pragprog.com:8080/rubyfaq/rubyfaq-5.html#ss5.3
>|and thought to try. I didn't manage to make "auto(in|de)crement" working
so

>  (1) ++ and -- are NOT reserved operator in Ruby.

Yes, I know. I just wanted to have a = integer; a.++ where we call a's
method ++ which increment's a's value by one.


>  (2) C's increment/decrement operators are in fact hidden assignment.
>      They affect variables, not objects.  You cannot accomplish
>      assignment via method.  Ruby uses +=/-= operator instead.

This was good to know. Actually I'm not sure what I've been thinking, but
maybe I took it granted that one could write method for assignment. Maybe
this was coming to me from C++. Brrr. I got some bad vibrations...

>  (3) self cannot be a target of assignment.  In addition, altering
>      the value of integer 1 might cause severe confusion throughout
>      the program.

Oh, now I see. Object Fixnum *is_a* number. It does not *have_a* number like
Integer class in Java. 

So 5.++ could return 6. But without implicit assigment X.++ does not make
any sense.

Well, I'm not going to create Integer just for fun of 

  def ++
    self.i += 1
  end

Happy enough? :-) I have to add that I was just trying to bend the language
instead of bringing yet another Bad Idea (tm) into it.

	- Aleksi