• @[email protected]
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    10 days ago

    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 🤭

    • Avid Amoeba
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      3810 days ago

      Yup. It’s completely inconsistent in its interpretation of the + operator.

      • @[email protected]
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        10 days ago

        Yeah, I actually had to try 1+“11” to check that it didn’t give me 12, but thankfully it commutes it’s consistent 😇

        • palordrolap
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          1810 days ago

          it commutes

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            810 days ago

            Nor would I expect “1312” to equal “1213”… Still that operator with these operands should just throw an exception

            • palordrolap
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              410 days ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                610 days ago

                expressly designed to carry on regardless

                I’m surprised they didn’t borrow On Error Resume Next from Visual Basic. Which was wrongly considered to be the worst thing in Visual Basic - when the real worst thing was On Error Resume. On Error Resume Next at least moved on to the next line of code when an error occurred; On Error Resume just executed the error-generating line again … and again … and again … and again …

              • @[email protected]
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                510 days ago

                Why would you need an entirely different way of concatenating strings? “11” + 1 -> exception. “11” + to_string(1) = “111”

                • palordrolap
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                  210 days ago

                  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.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    110 days ago

                    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? :)

    • @[email protected]
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      1210 days ago

      Yeah, this looks dumb on the surface, but you’ve got bigger problems if you’re trying to do math with strings

    • @[email protected]
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      1210 days ago

      It’s just doing a lot of stuff for you that it shouldn’t be in first place 🤭

      Kinda like log4j!