Compound Assignments
When writing programs, it is generally necessary to increment a variable. The problem with Lua and many other high-level scripting languages is that they don’t provide an efficient way to do such a this:
Although this method is simple and straightforward, it becomes inefficient when dealing with large-scale programs and longer variable names. Additionally, the VM needs to reference the value of a, add 13 to it, and update the original value of a. An operator for actions like this would decrease execution time and improve developer productivity. The following code block shows an example using the += compound assignment.
There is a compound assignment operator for each arithmetic and string operation in Lua, such as (+=, -=, /=, *=, ^=, %=, and ..=). Each operation assigns a variable the value of itself with the operation performed on the original value.
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