Not necessarily so if you come from a strong Assembly language background.  Most processors have a special instruction for incrementing a register that&#x27;s shorter (and faster) than the more generic ADD instruction.<p>For instance, on a 64-bit x86 machine,<p><pre><code>    ADD RAX,1
</code></pre>
is nine bytes long, while<p><pre><code>    INC RAX
</code></pre>
is one byte.  Maybe not as much a win these days, but back when memory was smaller and more expensive, it was worth it.