The news of the day is that I implemented the comment preview. So before leaving a comment, you have a chance to reread it and make corrections if needed. I trust that this won’t reduce the number of comments just because you have more chances to change your mind in the process 🙂 Also, let me know if anything’s wrong with the new version.
The link of the day is The Development of the C Language. This is a document written by Dennis M. Ritchie about the birth and evolution of the C language. Dating back to the days of the PDP-7 and Multics. The document explains the genesis of the C language and many of its quirks. If you (like me before reading this) believe that the “++” operator was introduced because it mapped on a specific assembly instruction you should read it.
Ok, you have no time, so the answer is – the PDP-7 had no pre/post increment/decrement assembly instruction. Instead, it had just 8k of 18 bits word of memory. So keeping things small was an urgent need. And x++ saves a bunch of bits with respect to x=x+1.