That being said; out of pure curiocity, would "now++;" compile? Wild guess: No, I think now (as well as other time expressions) are objects and not numbers. Also, such expression would not be very useful, since it's ambiguous depending on sample rate. (Or is the unit of now independent of the sample rate?)
Wow, you like to live on the edge! :) Maybe a bad example, I just wrote down the first thing that crossed my mind. But still that's most probably the way I'd write that piece of code in a real situation.
Unless I'm vastly mistaken, the code is compiled into exactly the same assembly commands as i++; x+i=>x; In other words, there's no computational benefit to writing that as a single statement. I haven't yet looked into the kernel of ChucK, but that's possible. But depending on the CPU architecture (Including both virtual and physical machines) and the effectiveness of the compiler having a statement with a unary operator will make sense from a computational point of view. On the other hand most C compilers have good optimization egines and don't need the statements to be nested by a human brain.
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