Or akin to PHP&#x27;s pass-by-reference ampersand, you could have something like `&amp;x + 1` which would expand to `x = x + 1`. Dunno what the impact on code readability&#x2F;maintainability would be, but it does sound nice.<p>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&#x27;t exactly better. Neither is endless chaining. Looks like we could still use some syntactic improvement.