Interesting facts about Increment and Decrement operators in Java

Increment operator is used to increment a value by 1. There are two varieties of increment operator: 

• Post-Increment: Value is first used for computing the result and then incremented.
• Pre-Increment: Value is incremented first and then the result is computed.

Example

Decrement operator is used for decrementing the value by 1. There are two varieties of decrement operators. 

• Post-decrement: Value is first used for computing the result and then decremented.
• Pre-decrement: Value is decremented first and then the result is computed.

Example

Now let us do Interesting facts about Increment and Decrement operators:

• Can only be applied to variables only
• Nesting of both operators is not allowed
• They are not operated over final variables
• Increment and Decrement Operators can not be applied to boolean.

Let us discuss these 4 facts as listed above and do implement them as follows:

Fact 1: Can be applied to variables only

We can apply ++ and -- operator only for variables but not for the constant values. If we are trying to apply ++ and -- operator on the constant value then we will get a compile-time error which we will be seeing in example 1B after the below example as follows:

Example 1:

11

Example 2:

Output:

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Fact 2: Nesting of both ++ and -- operators are not allowed 

Example

Output: 

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Fact 3:Final variables can’t apply increment and decrement operator

The increment and decrement operators can not be applied to final variables because of the simple reason that their value can not be changed. 

Example

Output: 

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Fact 4: Increment and Decrement Operators can not be applied to boolean

We can apply ++ and -- operators for all primitive data types except Boolean type as it only has true and false which even sounds impractical.

Example

Output:

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