Increment and decrement operators

Examples

The following C code fragment illustrates the difference between the pre and post increment and decrement operators:

int x;
int y;

// Increment operators
// Pre-increment: x is incremented by 1, then y is assigned the value of x
x = 1;
y = ++x;    // x is now 2, y is also 2

// Post-increment: y is assigned the value of x, then x is incremented by 1
x = 1;
y = x++;    // y is 1, x is now 2

// Decrement operators
// Pre-decrement: x is decremented by 1, then y is assigned the value of x
x = 1;
y = --x;    // x is now 0, y is also 0

// Post-decrement: y is assigned the value of x, then x is decremented by 1
x = 1;
y = x--;    // y is 1, x is now 0

In languages lacking these operators, equivalent results require an extra line of code:

# Pre-increment: y = ++x
x = 1
x = x + 1  # x is now 2  (can be written as "x += 1" in Python)
y = x      # y is also 2

# Post-increment: y = x++
x = 1
y = x      # y is 1
x = x + 1  # x is now 2

The post-increment operator is commonly used with array subscripts. For example:

// Sum the elements of an array
float sum_elements(float arr[], int n)
{
    float  sum = 0.0;
    int    i =   0;

    while (i < n)
        sum += arr[i++];    // Post-increment of i, which steps
                            //  through n elements of the array
    return sum;
}

The post-increment operator is also commonly used with pointers:

// Copy one array to another
void copy_array(float *src, float *dst, int n)
{
    while (n-- > 0)        // Loop that counts down from n to zero
        *dst++ = *src++;   // Copies element *(src) to *(dst),
                           //  then increments both pointers
}

Note that these examples also work in other C-like languages, such as C++, Java, and C#.

• Increment operator can be demonstrated by an example:

  #include <stdio.h>
  int main()
  {
    int c=2;
    printf("%d\n", c++); // this statement displays 2, then c is incremented by 1 to 3.
    printf("%d", ++c);   // this statement increments c by 1, then c is displayed.
    return 0;
  }
  

  • Output:

    2
    4
    

Supporting languages

The following list, though not complete or all-inclusive, lists some of the major programming languages that support the ++/-- increment/decrement operators.

(Apple's Swift once supported these operators,^[10] but support was removed as of version 3.)

Pascal, Delphi, Modula-2, and Oberon provide the same functions, but they are called inc(x) and dec(x).

Notably Python and Rust do not support these operators.

History

The concept was introduced in the B programming language circa 1969 by Ken Thompson.^[11]

Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines whether the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand. They were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way. People often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and Unix first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no PDP-11 when B was developed. The PDP-7, however, did have a few 'auto-increment' memory cells, with the property that an indirect memory reference through them incremented the cell. This feature probably suggested such operators to Thompson; the generalization to make them both prefix and postfix was his own. Indeed, the auto-increment cells were not used directly in implementation of the operators, and a stronger motivation for the innovation was probably his observation that the translation of ++x was smaller than that of x=x+1.

See also

• Augmented assignment – for += and -= operators
• PDP-7
• PDP-11
• Successor function

References