edit2: you'd use a pre-increment on it's own line? i tend to stick to post-increments if it's on it's own line.

Some programmers see postincrement as a no-no, especially because of the behavior of some standard classes with those operators in some cases (don't remember the exact details)... Postincrement does look nicer in the source code though.

i'm curious if you intended the counter to actually be useful in making sure isAlive return the correct result?

edit: actually, after re-reading the code several times, i'm not sure if it does actually fix it.

Fix is almost certainly the wrong word for that code. If my attempt doesn't actually cause the resulting program to "work", then please take it that this was intended as hilarious commentary on how such band-aids often fail to achieve what they set out to do. I, umm, I'm sure I must have meant it that way...

edit2: you'd use a pre-increment on it's own line? i tend to stick to post-increments if it's on it's own line.

I generally avoid using the increment operators as part of more complex expressions, and I use pre-increment due to auto-pilot from writing loops. Thanks to spending a bit of time with Ruby, I wouldn't mind switching to += 1, at least for integers.

edit2: you'd use a pre-increment on it's own line? i tend to stick to post-increments if it's on it's own line.

Pre-increment is never slower than and sometimes faster than post-increment.

Postfix creates a copy of the original value which takes a small bit of extra time.
However when it is on its own line and is its own statement, the copy is nothing more than an address of a temporary or a register, but no instructions to actually act upon it, which makes it impossible for any compiler to generate code to reference it, and without it being referenced any compiler written within the last 276.45 (as of the time of writing) years will also omit the copy operation itself, leading to equivalent code either way.

However, in general, you should prefer prefix when possible, even on its own line, if for nothing more than the practice and consistency.


L. Spiro