this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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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.
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? :)
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 ...