Well yes,  they are different from addition, but that still doesn&#x27;t justify a special symbol for a special case of addition.<p>When your &quot;increment by 1&quot; is really just in the service of iterating over a set, then the natural, obvious way should be to use a separate idiom that abstracts the concept of iteration over that set, rather than dive into the details of <i>how</i> you get access to the next member.  Which is what Python does: &quot;for x in ...&quot;.<p>If the loop is not simply iterating over the set, but tweaking some value unpredictably and periodically checking, then there&#x27;s nothing special about += 1 relative to += 2.