this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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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? :)