Say I have a int variable called count, I was wondering how many primitive operations are int the statement:
count++;
Would it be 3? Because if you write it out in a different form, such as:
count = count + 1;
It has 1 read, 1 operation, and 1 write. So that would mean the statement count++ counts as 3 primitive operations right?
Yes, it may be seen as having 3 operations. That means it is a constant number of operations, so for Big O notation, it is the same as if there were only 1 operation or 10, as long as it is constant.
On most processors (or virtual machines, since you tagged your question with "java" tag) there is special instruction for incrementing value by some small amount.
i.e. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_bytecode_instruction_listings - iinc
Therefore I'd count simple increment as 1 primitive operation (although internally it still gets executed as read-increment-write).
