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 _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue12188> _______________________________________