Python - Increment and Decrement Operators

Python

Share
python logo

If you are familiar with other programming languages like C, Java, PHP then you know there exists two operators namely Increment and Decrement operators denoted by ++ and -- respectively.

There is no Increment and Decrement operators in Python.

This may look odd but in Python if we want to increment value of a variable by 1 we write += or x = x + 1 and to decrement the value by 1 we use -= or do x = x - 1.

Reasons for not having the operators

Some of the possible logical reasons for not having increment and decrement operators in Python are listed below.

  • Can achieve similar result using += and -=.
  • Including ++ and -- will result in the addition of some more opcode to the language which may result into slower VM engine.
  • Common use of ++ and -- is in loop and in Python for loop is generally written as for i in range(0, 10) thus removing the need for a ++ operator.

There are other reasons as well and you can Google them.

Example #1

Following is a simple PHP code using for loop to print from 1 to 10.

<?php
for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++) {
  echo $i . " ";
}
?>

The above code will print integer numbers from 1 to 10.

We can achieve the same result in Python using for loop.

for i in range(1, 11):
  print(i)

The above Python code will also print integer numbers from 1 to 10.

We will cover Python For Loop in the loop tutorials. And we will also talk more about the range() function.

Example #2

In the following C code we are printing integer numbers from 10 to 1 using for loop.

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
  int i;
  for (i = 10; i >= 1; i--) {
    printf("%d ", i);
  }
  return 0;
}

We can achieve the same result in Python by writing the following code.

for i in range(10, 0, -1):
  print(i)
Share