You're absolutely right that developers should know this stuff. But that's to some degree the wrong point to make. When considering the maintainability and co

You're absolutely right that developers should know this stuff. But that's to some degree the wrong point to make. When considering the maintainability and correctness of the codebase, "clever" hacks are often not desirable. Nowadays, there's no performance gain to be had by indulging in such tricks; the optimiser will do the right thing for both cases. The problem for me here is not that it's "too complex", but that it's ambiguous even for experts with a casual glance. It makes perfect sense right now after you've written it, but months or years later, the person reading this while doing some maintenance or debugging might glance over and not see the subtlety of pre- vs post-increment while they are busy with other tasks and deadlines. It does make sense to avoid such pitfalls, where possible.