One reason why Go's increment and decrement statements are good to have

December 29, 2016

Go is generally a minimal language as far as both language keywords and features go. It's not quite down to Scheme level minimalism, it's far more pragmatic than that, but it does try to be small. In among this smallness, one thing may stand out; I'm thinking of the increment and decrement statements, 'i++' and 'j--'.

There's strictly speaking no need for these to exist. Since Go makes them statements instead of operators, they are exactly equivalent to 'i += 1' and 'j -= 1'. Yet not only do they exist, but if you run golint over code that contains the assignment versions it will suggest simplifying them to increment and decrement:

fred.go:4:2: should replace i += 1 with i++

I don't know why Go has decided to go this way, but I do see at least one advantage to using increment and decrement statements instead of assignments: increment and decrement make your intentions clear. Anyone (including yourself) who later reads your code knows that it's not accident or happenstance that you're moving by 1s; it's fully intentional. If there's a bug and this is not the right increment, you may need to look at larger sections of the algorithm, not just change a constant and see if it works; similarly if you now need to move in different strides.

In a related thing, it's also more visually distinctive. Increment and decrement statements stand out, partly because they don't have an =, and probably read faster since you don't have to parse the number when scanning them.

This wouldn't be enough to justify them in a minimal language, but in a pragmatic language like Go I'm glad they exist. Incrementing and decrementing things is common enough that it's nice to have a compact and distinctive idiom that makes your intentions clear.

Sidebar: The operator versus statement distinction here

C has increment and decrement operators. You can use ++ and -- in any context just like other operators, so you can write:

i = j++ * 10 - fred(k++);

And other equally complicated expressions. Often the complications arise with pointers in various contexts.

Go has increment and decrement only as statements, not as operators (and this is deliberate). That line is invalid Go; as statements, ++ and -- must occur on their own, not as part of expressions in assignment statements, function calls, and so on.

Written on 29 December 2016.
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Last modified: Thu Dec 29 00:16:08 2016
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