Well, Lua also does not support += or any of it's counterparts. You have to be extremely literal with x = x + 1, which is just a huge waste for very little gain.

I'm all for beginners learning easier constructs... teach them x = x + 1 if you want, just don't remove the shorter constructs for the rest of us.

Iterating a list/array is just one of many use cases for the increment/decrement operators anyway...