Why are there no ++ and --​ operators in Python?

Of course, we could say "Guido just decided that way", but I think the question is really about the reasons for that decision. I think there are several reasons:

• It mixes together statements and expressions, which is not good practice. See http://norvig.com/python-iaq.html
• It generally encourages people to write less readable code
• Extra complexity in the language implementation, which is unnecessary in Python, as already mentioned

Maybe a better question would be to ask why do these operators exist in C. K&R calls increment and decrement operators 'unusual' (Section 2.8page 46). The Introduction calls them 'more concise and often more efficient'. I suspect that the fact that these operations always come up in pointer manipulation also has played a part in their introduction. In Python it has been probably decided that it made no sense to try to optimise increments (in fact I just did a test in C, and it seems that the gcc-generated assembly uses addl instead of incl in both cases) and there is no pointer arithmetic; so it would have been just One More Way to Do It and we know Python loathes that.