system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does incrementing (a++ and a=a+1) have the same ‘cost’ in computer? Or it depends on the programming language and the way incrementing is implemented low-level?
gpt
It does depend, but in a sensible language it shouldn't, most languages it won't, certainly not any mainstream C compiler. 

That said, addition is extremely cheap and is very rarely going to be the bottleneck in your application. 

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth

It's much more important to write working code, and then second to write modular code. Once you've done that, if you notice your application not being fast enough, then you can make it faster. 

There are some exceptions, but these are generally "best practices". So for example if you have an enormous list of things and you want to check if something is in that list, that list had better be a hash table (dict/vector etc.). Anyway--computers are fast, don't worry about small stuff like that for now.