Increment and Decrement

The increment and decrement operations first appeared in the experimental programming language developed it in 1969 by B. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie while working at Bell Labs. Dennis Ritchie later moved these operations to his new language called C. Bash later copied these behaviors from C.

Assignment operations

First, let’s consider assignment operations to help us understand how increment and decrement work. A regular assignment in arithmetic evaluation looks like this: