Pet programming peeves . . .

Avoid Postfix Increment Operator
© Conrad Weisert, Information Disciplines, Inc., Chicago
11 December 2008

NOTE: This document may be circulated or quoted from freely, as long as the copyright credit is included.

The operator-rich C programming language provided increment (++) and decrement (--) operators in two forms:

1. The prefix operator that modifies its operand before using its value: (++k)
2. The postfix operator that uses its operand's value and then modifies the operand. (k++)

C's descendants, C++, Java, and C#, support those operators.¹

That allows compact expressions, often avoiding the need for multiple assignment statements and temporary variables. When one of these operators appears within a longer expression, for example as an array subscript, it makes a huge difference whether the prefix or the postfix form was used. However, these operators are also sometimes used in a complete statement, especially as the increment specification in a for statement.

for (ctr=0; ctr<N; ++ctr)

In that case it makes no difference at all to the result whether the prefix or postfix form was specified. But it can make a significant difference in the program's performance.

If the operand is a built-in type, such as int, then the two are equivalent, but if the operand is an instance of a class, such as a Date object or an iterator, then the overloaded postfix operator has to create a new temporary object², which may involve memory allocation or other expensive overhead. On the other hand an overloaded prefix operator just advances the value of the operand object and returns that object.

But for reasons that I've never heard explained many, perhaps most, textbooks³ and course materials have adopted the opposite convention:

for (ctr=0; ctr<N; ctr++) // No!

and that pattern has influenced the coding of thousands of programmers who churn it out almost automatically. While some may argue that it makes no difference (because they use the increment operator only with built-in types), I find the practice puzzling. If it makes no difference, why not cultivate the habit of the more direct and efficient option? Future program maintenance might replace a simple int with an object, and even Java may eventually accept overloaded operators.