Numbers are immutable and incrementing one eg in an attribute is actuay many byte code ops. So doesn't work even currently unless you are fine with losing updates. But a version of this question using another example (eg using a list as a queue) is interesting.
Yep. So in a final answer to the original question of backwards bug-compatibility (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28897534), it seems that it will be retained under the current proposal.