From: Benoit Daloze <eregontp@...>
Date: 2009-12-23T02:10:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's implementation of Fixnum-assignment

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I believe Matz decided against because a) there is a pretty short
idiom which does this already ("a += 1") and b) that existing idiom
has an equals sign in there thus making the assignment obvious; "++a"
on the contrary does not have an equals sign anywhere and thus would
obscure the fact that under the hood an assignment is taking place.
This would make the code harder to read while not bringing any
benefits to the language.

I would add than using i += 1 is often doing it the wrong way in Ruby. We
use Enumerable most of the time, and try to not create any index (because
that's awful, you need an initialization(i=0), a step to go forward(i+=1),
and you keep a useless index at the end).

If you really need an index, you can always use #upto , #downto or #step.

Every time you need an index (that means the index of the Enumerable thing
you're iterating is meaningful), you should use #each_with_index or
#with_index.

For example,  This is my last contribution to RPCFN 4 (pretty-printing
Polynomials):
http://github.com/eregon/RPCFN4/blob/master/solutions/benoit_daloze.rb
Look at the usage of #each_with_index, followed by inject.

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