Behaviour of increment and decrement operators in Python

Question

I notice that a pre-increment decrement operator can be applied on a variable  like   count   It compiles  but it does not actually change the value of the variable   What is the behavior of the pre-increment decrement operators     --  in Python    Why does Python deviate from the behavior of these operators seen in C C

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In python 3 8  you can do    a  a 1   same as   a  increment  then return new value   a  a 1 -1  same as a    return the incremented value -1   useless   You can do a lot of thinks with this   gt  gt  gt  a   0  gt  gt  gt  while  a  a 1   lt  5      print a        1 2 3 4  Or if you want write somthing with more sophisticated syntaxe  the goal is not optimization    gt  gt  gt  del a  gt  gt  gt  while  a     a if  a  in locals   else 0    1   lt  5      print a        1 2 3 4  It will return 0 even if  a  doesn t exist without errors  and then will set it to 1

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TL DR  Python does not have unary increment decrement operators  --      Instead  to increment a value  use   a    1   More detail and gotchas  But be careful here  If you re coming from C  even this is different in python  Python doesn t have  variables  in the sense that C does  instead python uses names and objects  and in python ints are immutable   so lets say you do  a   1   What this means in python is  create an object of type int having value 1 and bind the name a to it  The object is an instance of int having value 1  and the name a refers to it  The name a and the object to which it refers are distinct   Now lets say you do   a    1   Since ints are immutable  what happens here is as follows    look up the object that a refers to  it is an int with id 0x559239eeb380  look up the value of object 0x559239eeb380  it is 1  add 1 to that value  1   1   2  create a new int object with value 2  it has object id 0x559239eeb3a0  rebind the name a to this new object Now a refers to object 0x559239eeb3a0 and the original object  0x559239eeb380  is no longer refered to by the name a  If there aren t any other names refering to the original object it will be garbage collected later    Give it a try yourself   a   1 print hex id a    a    1 print hex id a

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When you want to increment or decrement  you typically want to do that on an integer  Like so   b     But in Python  integers are immutable  That is you can t change them  This is because the integer objects can be used under several names  Try this    gt  gt  gt  b   5  gt  gt  gt  a   5  gt  gt  gt  id a  162334512  gt  gt  gt  id b  162334512  gt  gt  gt  a is b True   a and b above are actually the same object  If you incremented a  you would also increment b  That s not what you want  So you have to reassign  Like this   b   b   1   Or simpler   b    1   Which will reassign b to b 1  That is not an increment operator  because it does not increment b  it reassigns it   In short  Python behaves differently here  because it is not C  and is not a low level wrapper around machine code  but a high-level dynamic language  where increments don t make sense  and also are not as necessary as in C  where you use them every time you have a loop  for example

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While the others answers are correct in so far as they show what a mere   usually does  namely  leave the number as it is  if it is one   they are incomplete in so far as they don t explain what happens   To be exact   x evaluates to x   pos     and   x to x   pos       pos       I could imagine a VERY weird class structure  Children  don t do this at home   like this   class ValueKeeper object       def   init   self  value   self value   value     def   str   self   return str self value   class A ValueKeeper       def   pos   self           print  called A   pos            return B self value - 3   class B ValueKeeper       def   pos   self           print  called B   pos            return A self value   19   x   A 430  print x  type x  print  x  type  x  print   x  type   x  print    x  type    x

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In Python  a distinction between expressions and statements is rigidly   enforced  in contrast to languages such as Common Lisp  Scheme  or   Ruby    Wikipedia  So by introducing such operators  you would break the expression statement split    For the same reason you can t write  if x   0    y   1   as you can in some other languages where such distinction is not preserved

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There are no post pre increment decrement operators in python like in languages like C   We can see    or -- as multiple signs getting multiplied  like we do in maths  -1     -1      1    E g   ---count   Parses as  - - -count      Which translates to  -  count    Because  multiplication of - sign with - sign is    And finally   -count

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is not an operator  It is two   operators  The   operator is the identity operator  which does nothing   Clarification  the   and - unary operators only work on numbers  but I presume that you wouldn t expect a hypothetical    operator to work on strings      count   Parses as     count    Which translates to  count   You have to use the slightly longer    operator to do what you want to do   count    1   I suspect the    and -- operators were left out for consistency and simplicity  I don t know the exact argument Guido van Rossum gave for the decision  but I can imagine a few arguments    Simpler parsing  Technically  parsing   count is ambiguous  as it could be       count  two unary   operators  just as easily as it could be     count  one unary    operator   It s not a significant syntactic ambiguity  but it does exist  Simpler language     is nothing more than a synonym for    1  It was a shorthand invented because C compilers were stupid and didn t know how to optimize a    1 into the inc instruction most computers have  In this day of optimizing compilers and bytecode interpreted languages  adding operators to a language to allow programmers to optimize their code is usually frowned upon  especially in a language like Python that is designed to be consistent and readable  Confusing side-effects  One common newbie error in languages with    operators is mixing up the differences  both in precedence and in return value  between the pre- and post-increment decrement operators  and Python likes to eliminate language  gotcha -s  The precedence issues of pre- post-increment in C are pretty hairy  and incredibly easy to mess up

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Python does not have these operators  but if you really need them you can write a function having the same functionality   def PreIncrement name  local           Equivalent to   name     if name in local          local name   1         return local name      globals   name   1     return globals   name   def PostIncrement name  local           Equivalent to name       if name in local          local name   1         return local name -1     globals   name   1     return globals   name -1   Usage   x   1 y   PreIncrement  x    y and x are both 2 a   1 b   PostIncrement  a    b is 1 and a is 2   Inside a function you have to add locals   as a second argument if you want to change local variable  otherwise it will try to change global   x   1 def test        x   10     y   PreIncrement  x    y will be 2  local x will be still 10 and global x will be changed to 2     z   PreIncrement  x   locals     z will be 11  local x will be 11 and global x will be unaltered test     Also with these functions you can do   x   1 print PreIncrement  x       print x  1  is illegal    But in my opinion following approach is much clearer   x   1 x  1 print x    Decrement operators   def PreDecrement name  local           Equivalent to --name     if name in local          local name - 1         return local name      globals   name - 1     return globals   name   def PostDecrement name  local           Equivalent to name--     if name in local          local name - 1         return local name  1     globals   name - 1     return globals   name  1   I used these functions in my module translating javascript to python

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Yeah  I missed    and -- functionality as well  A few million lines of c code engrained that kind of thinking in my old head  and rather than fight it    Here s a class I cobbled up that implements   pre- and post-increment  pre- and post-decrement  addition  subtraction  multiplication  division  results assignable as integer  printable  settable    Here  tis   class counter object       def   init   self v 0           self set v       def preinc self           self v    1         return self v     def predec self           self v -  1         return self v      def postinc self           self v    1         return self v - 1     def postdec self           self v -  1         return self v   1      def   add   self addend           return self v   addend     def   sub   self subtrahend           return self v - subtrahend     def   mul   self multiplier           return self v   multiplier     def   div   self divisor           return self v   divisor      def   getitem   self           return self v      def   str   self           return str self v       def set self v           if type v     int              v   0         self v   v   You might use it like this   c   counter                              defaults to zero for listItem in myList                   imaginary task      doSomething c postinc   listItem    passes c  but becomes c 1      already having c  you could do this     c set 11  while c predec    gt  0      print c       or just     d   counter 11  while d predec    gt  0      print d      and for  re- assignment into integer     c   counter 100  d   c   223   assignment as integer c   c   223   re-assignment as integer print type c  c    lt type  int  gt  323      while this will maintain c as type counter   c   counter 100  c set c   223  print type c  c    lt class    main   counter  gt  323   EDIT   And then there s this bit of unexpected  and thoroughly unwanted  behavior   c   counter 42  s     s   d      Expecting 42  c    but getting non-numeric exception print s      because inside that tuple  getitem   isn t what used  instead a reference to the object is passed to the formatting function  Sigh  So   c   counter 42  s     s   d      Expecting 42  c v    and getting 42  print s      or  more verbosely  and explicitly what we actually wanted to happen  although counter-indicated in actual form by the verbosity  use c v instead      c   counter 42  s     s   d      Expecting 42  c   getitem        and getting 42  print s

[python] Behaviour of increment and decrement operators in Python

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