Increment and decrement operators

Increment and decrement operators are unary operators that add or subtract one from their operand, respectively. They are commonly implemented in imperative programming languages. C-like languages became notorious for featuring two versions (pre- and post-) of each operator with slightly different semantics.

In C-like languages, the increment operators are written ++ and the decrement operators are written --.

The increment operator increases the value of its operand by 1. The operand must have an arithmetic data type, and must refer to a modifiable data object. Similarly, the decrement operator decreases the value of its modifiable arithmetic operand by 1.

In languages that support both versions of the operators, the pre-increment and pre-decrement operators increment (or decrement) their operand by 1, and the value of the expression is the resulting incremented (or decremented) value. In contrast, the post-increment and post-decrement operators increase (or decrease) the value of their operand by 1, but the value of the expression is the operand's original value prior to the increment (or decrement) operation. In languages where increment/decrement is not an expression (e.g. Go), only one version is needed (in the case of Go, post operators only).

Since the increment/decrement operator modifies its operand, use of such an operand more than once within the same expression can produce undefined results. For example, in expressions such as x − ++x, it is not clear in what sequence the subtraction and increment operators should be performed. Situations like this are made even worse when optimizations are applied by the compiler, which could result in the order of execution of the operations to be different than what the programmer intended.

Contents

Examples

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

int  x;
int  y;
 
// Increment operators
x = 1;
y = ++x;    // x is now 2, y is also 2
y = x++;    // x is now 3, y is 2
 
// Decrement operators
x = 3;
y = x--;    // x is now 2, y is 3
y = --x;    // x is now 1, y is also 1

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;
}

Likewise, the post-increment operator is commonly used with pointers:

// Copy one array to another using pointers
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#.

Supporting languages

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

See also

References