It would be much cooler to override the plus operator and add one to any addition. This can easily be done in the Julia language,(reply>), The concept of operator overloading is popular in C++ in particular. However, there are reasons for why Java doesn't support it: Unlike C++, Java has a reasonable amount of features. So whenever you're reading Java source code, you don't have to worry whether 2 + 2 will actually return 4. :-)