I really disagree that this is madness. It may be madness to someone not used to coding in C. But if you code a lot of C you _will_ know when to use which one of these, and you will know that they're immensely useful.

For example, iterating and adding stuff to arrays:

array[index++] = object;

instead of

array[index] = object; index += 1;

and the other way around:

array[++index] = object;

instead of:

index += 1; array[index] = object;

There is no way you will miss incrementing your index here, or do it in the wrong place. This is so common, that as a C-programmer you WILL recognize this pattern.

It's even better when iterating pointers instead of integers. May I ask what the following means to you?

float *float_ptr; float_ptr += 1;

I think writing ++float_ptr here is just much more clear. Incrementing pointers by integers just feels wrong when what you really are doing is incrementing it with sizeof(float_ptr).