From: Christopher Dicely <cmdicely@...>
Date: 2008-08-29T16:29:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Please don't flame me...why is there no "++" in Ruby again ?

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 12:04 AM, Robert Dober <robert.dober@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 7:27 AM, David Masover <ninja@slaphack.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday 28 August 2008 16:25:59 Joel VanderWerf wrote:
>>> John Pritchard-williams wrote:
>>> > I did check my Ruby books by the way, but they just "unlike C there is
>>> > no ++ operator in Ruby...." :)
>>>
>>> In ruby, operators are methods and they operate on objects, not on
>>> variables.
>>
>> That's not really a valid reason, and not entirely true -- there is no +=
>> method for you to define. It behaves as though it's a macro:
> You are right of course, the original question was, why is there no
> x++ as syntactic sugar for x = x + 1.

Because Ruby is hard enough to parse as it is. After all, ++x is
already valid Ruby. equivalent to x.send(:"+@").send(:"+@"). And x++x
is valid (though odd) Ruby, equivalent to x.+(x.send(:"+@")).

Its probably better to just let people use x+=1.