Wrappers
are immutable. This was done so that you can use them in more than one context and not worry about them being changed.
With
Java 5.0, there is now auto-boxing and auto-unboxing so that the increment operators now work on wrappers. What happens is that the wrapper is converted to a primitive, the incrementation is done and then the result is a new wrapper object.
My opinion is that I'd rather box and unbox myself but that's the way that it is now with Java 5+
Kaydell