New submission from Terry J. Reedy tjreedy@udel.edu:
In response to a discussion of a patch removing 'useless' post-increments, (which issue has apparently come up before) Guido posted "> Sorry to butt in here, but I agree with Eric that it was better
before. There is a common idiom, *pointer++ =<something>, and whenever you see that you know that you are appending something to an output buffer. Perhaps the most important idea here is that this maintains the *invariant* "pointer points just after the last thing in the buffer". Always maintaining the invariant is better than trying to micro-optimize things so as to avoid updating dead values. The compiler is better at that."
A condensed version of the above added to PEP 7 would help new developers see the usage as local idiom rather than style bug.
---------- assignee: docs@python components: Documentation messages: 136991 nosy: docs@python, terry.reedy priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: PEP 7, C style: add ++ policy and explanation
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