Understanding Incrementing

Question

For example this:

var a = 123;
var b = a++;

now a contains 124 and b contains 123

Answer 1

Note that you can also write

b = ++a;

Which has the effect you are probably expecting.

It's important to realise that there are two things going on here: the assignment and the increment and the language should define in which order they will happen. As we have available both ++a and a++ it makes sense that they should have different meanings.

For those of us from a C background, this is quite natural. If PHP behaves differently, we might be wondering why PHP chose to deviate from what we are accustomed to.