"DennisE" wrote...
. . . I would classify doing such things as being among the poorest
programming practices ever seen. . . .

That's probably because you've never programmed in C or its offspring. There's a
certain satisfaction to knowing whether

x---y

evaluates as (x--)-y or x-(--y). That and a long & honorable tradition of
lauding obfuscated code that approached (but can never surpass) the opacity of
hand-crafted APL.

If --x did nothing, as +x does, then I'd agree it should be avoided. The sad
fact is that it does do something, and that something is often necessary even
though it appears to be as pointless as raising to the 1 power, multiplying by 1
or adding 0 (or converting numbers to text, appending "").

--
To top-post is human, to bottom-post and snip is sublime.