Exactly. This was canvassed recently on the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup. The “justification” offered for preferring post-increment was this:

The point is that $l++ looks better (IMO of course) because you don't have two plus signs butted up against a dollar sign.

To which Rainer Weikusat replied:

I'm totally aware that "it looks better" because "that's how it has always been done since nineteen-seventy-something[*]" and I am actually arguing in favor of changing this habit: All other arithmetic expressions return the value computed by them, only postdecrement and -increment-expressions don't. Hence, unless this property is exploited for something, don't use them, since they're "weird and special".

[*] Some years ago, I read one of the many "your writing style has to match my intellectual laziness, otherwise, you suck" (and I'll hit you since I'm The Big Guy and you're The Insignificant Insect) which demanded that the return value of ++ must not be used because "if I need to understand the difference between ++a and a++ to understand your code, it's too complicated". And I strongly suspect this to be the 'the real postincrement motiviation' in many practical cases ...

And I suppose the commonly seen prejudice in favour of the post-increment and post-decrement forms is constantly (if subliminally) reinforced in the programmer’s mind by Bjarne Stroustrup’s choice of name for “C++”.  :-)

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re^6: quickness is not so obvious by Athanasius
in thread quickness is not so obvious by DanBev

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