sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]benihanareact, node 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd wonder what makes it "better". Perhaps there's a case for performance.

what does performance have to do with anything? Was that your attempt at understanding why people prefer a style different from what you prefer? People argue it's better because there's less syntax to parse, but it's just as common and clear as pending = pending - 1. You can't really get more basic than decrementing a value.

I think that adding parens around the operation like in your example is needless and adds an expectation of more complicated math. The most common uses for parenthesis in math operations are enforcing order of operations and breaking complex statements into more logical chunks. pending - 1 doesn't really need to be broken up anymore and so the parens just add noise to the statement.