While it is practical and works, it is not an operator by itself. It a combination of two, the unary decrementation and greater than comparator.
Read it as
i-- > value
.As explained by multiple answers in the link :)
I’m mainly pointing at the sarcastic answers on that link
Yeah, I have just read through some of those. It is hilarious what people can come up with.
Honestly, I’m not sure which I think is worse. Having an explicit down-to operator or being able to combine operators in a way that confuses experienced programmers.
Kotlin has one (well, more like keyword, but aren’t operators just keywords written in non-alphabetic)
downTo
It wouldn’t have surprised me at all, if they did (they love their keywords), but that one actually isn’t a keyword. It’s an extension method implemented for the various number types, so you can also write
5.downTo(1)
.
This kind of combined operators are quite common in the competitive programming world, where the speed of coding is more important than readable.
Yeah, still horrid for real-world programming, though, where readability is ten times as important as how quickly you can type it out.
I’d argue the problem here is more the unary (in/de)crement operator. It isn’t really necessary and most of the time it doesn’t make stuff more readable.
It is readable.
Thanks.