What is the difference between increment and decrement operators

Using a variable named counter; in generic terms, for example:. That is you fetch the existing value of the counter and add one then store the answer back into the variable counter. Many programming languages allow their increment and decrement operators to only be used with the integer data type.

Programmers will sometimes use inc and dec as abbreviations for increment and decrement respectively. Several programming languages support increment and decrement operators:. The increment operator is represented by two plus signs in a row. As statements, the four examples all do the same thing. They add 1 to the value of whatever is stored in counter. The decrement operator is represented by two minus signs in a row. They would subtract 1 from the value of whatever was in the variable being decremented.

The precedence of increment and decrement depends on if the operator is attached to the right of the operand postfix or to the left of the operand prefix.

Note that postfix and prefix do not have the same precedence. Postfix increment says to use my existing value then when you are done with the other operators; increment me. An example:. The first use of the oldest variable is an Rvalue context where the existing value of 44 is pulled or fetched and then assigned to the variable age; then the variable oldest is incremented with its value changing from 44 to This seems to be a violation of precedence because increment is higher precedence than assignment.

But that is how postfix increment works. Increment Operators: The increment operator is used to increment the value of a variable in an expression. In the Pre-Increment, value is first incremented and then used inside the expression. Whereas in the Post-Increment, value is first used inside the expression and then incremented. Syntax: Take a step-up from those "Hello World" programs.

Learn to implement data structures like Heap, Stacks, Linked List and many more! Check out our Data Structures in C course to start learning today. Recommended Articles. Minimum increment and decrement by K of each pair elements required to make all array elements equal. Minimum decrement operations to make Array elements equal by only decreasing K each time. Article Contributed By :. Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. Writing code in comment?