this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Hm, playing devil's advocate, I think it is because the minus has not been defined as a string operation (e.g. it could pop the last char), so it defaults to the mathematical operation and converts both inputs into ints.
The first is assumed to be a concat because one of the parcels is a string...
It's just doing a lot of stuff for you that it shouldn't be in first place ๐คญ
Yup. It's completely inconsistent in its interpretation of the + operator.
Yeah, I actually had to try 1+"11" to check that it didn't give me 12, but thankfully ~~it commutes~~ it's consistent ๐
Maybe the behaviour with regard to type conversion, but not for the operation itself.
"13"+12 and 12+"13" don't yield the same result.
Nor would I expect "1312" to equal "1213".. Still that operator with these operands should just throw an exception
Given it's JavaScript, which was expressly designed to carry on regardless, I could see an argument for it returning NaN, (or silently doing what Perl does, like I mention in a different comment) but then there'd have to be an entirely different way of concatenating strings.
I'm surprised they didn't borrow
On Error Resume Nextfrom Visual Basic. Which was wrongly considered to be the worst thing in Visual Basic - when the real worst thing wasOn Error Resume.On Error Resume Nextat least moved on to the next line of code when an error occurred;On Error Resumejust executed the error-generating line again ... and again ... and again ... and again ...Why would you need an entirely different way of concatenating strings? "11" + 1 -> exception. "11" + to_string(1) = "111"
You're right. I've got too much Perl on the brain and forgot my roots. There is a language that does what you're talking about with the '+' operator: BASIC
Good luck getting the same thing retrofitted into JavaScript though. I can imagine a large number of websites would break or develop mysterious problems if this (mis)behaviour was fixed.
I don't think there's a way to retrofit JS - but php versions are deprecated all the time. Why not do the same with client-side script versions? :)
Yeah, this looks dumb on the surface, but you've got bigger problems if you're trying to do math with strings
Better than doing physics with strings
Kinda like log4j!