Is it legal to use the increment operator in a C++ function call?

Question

There\'s been some debate going on in this question about whether the following code is legal C++:

std::list::iterator i = items.begin();
while          


        

Answer 1

Sutter's Guru of the Week #55 (and the corresponding piece in "More Exceptional C++") discusses this exact case as an example.

According to him, it is perfectly valid code, and in fact a case where trying to transform the statement into two lines:

items.erase(i);
i++;

does not produce code that is semantically equivalent to the original statement.