Why do In-place operators allow you to write code like 'x = x + 3' as 'x += 3'?

Question

Why are operators such as 'x = x + 3' represented as 'x += 3'?

Coming from FORTRAN, I find that the representation of in-place operators that Python uses is very confusing.

Is there a reason?

Answer 1

With Python, the code needs to be read, understood, and then executed so making the code more concise makes it run faster. Other languages added the conciseness prior to optimizations being available to do it automatically. Fortran had the advantage of being the first language supporting optimizations so didn't need language support.