Or akin to PHP's pass-by-reference ampersand, you could have something like `&x + 1` which would expand to `x = x + 1`. Dunno what the impact on code readabilit

Or akin to PHP's pass-by-reference ampersand, you could have something like `&x + 1` which would expand to `x = x + 1`. Dunno what the impact on code readability/maintainability would be, but it does sound nice. Especially when doing straightforward data manipulations in R or Python, endless lines of `bla = map(bla, fn)` start to look crufty, so much so that Pandas in Python now allows you to add `inplace=True` to almost any data manipulation method to cut down on the verbosity. But then, sprinkling that keyword argument across every line isn't exactly better. Neither is endless chaining. Looks like we could still use some syntactic improvement.