Is there a way to denote a repeated operation?

Question

For instance, if you have say:

4 + x = 10

We instantly calculate 10 - 4 to derive x, which is 6. So you could say there is only 1 operation, subtraction, where 4 is subtracted from 10. As simple as this seems however, you can't just 'magically' subtract 4 from 10, you have to do so step by step, i.e in increments of 1.

Is there a way to denote this? Something I had in mind was:

10 - 1 ... -4 = x

Or more generally, where a and b are known constants, and x is the unknown:

a + b = x
x - 1 ... -a = b
x - 1 ... -b = a

Where -1 ... -a means that you subtract 1 until you reach a, so all in all you subtract a total of a.

Answer 1

Something like $$ x -\underbrace{1 - \ldots -1 }_{4 \text{ times}} $$ is how I've always seen it.

Answer 2

Let

$$u (x) := x+1 \qquad \qquad d (x) := x-1$$

and

$$f^{(n)} := f \circ f^{(n-1)} \qquad \qquad f^{(0)} := \mbox{id}$$

Hence, if $a$ is a positive integer, then $d^{(a)} (a) = 0$. If $b$ is a negative integer, then $u^{(-b)} (b) = 0$.

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In Haskell,

λ take 11 $ iterate (\x->x-1) 10 
[10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1,0]