From: tamouse mailing lists <tamouse.lists@...>
Date: 2013-04-15T12:08:30+09:00
Subject: Wondering why no "increment" or "decrement" operator in ruby

Seems like every other language I've encountered since learning C way
back in the Jurassic, has had an increment (++) or decrement (--)
operator, and I've been wondering why Ruby doesn't. I haven't gone off
looking for the answer, but I think I have figured out why it can't
work, roughly, in general, and
not-really-knowing-the-deep-implementation reasons why.

Basically, because you cannot do something like this:

    1.increment

and expect your 1 to start having the value of 2. Since 1 is an object
that is an instance of Fixnum, and doing

    a = 1

basically is just saying `a` points the object `1`, you can't have
`a.increment`, either.

Have I got it?