String concatenation: why period?

Why did the designers of PHP decide to use period (".") as the string
concatenation operator rater than the obviously more logical plus
("+")?

//JJ

On 20 Aug 2004 15:40:32 -0700, jonjo002@yahoo.com (Jonathan) wrote:

>Why did the designers of PHP decide to use period (".") as the string
>concatenation operator rater than the obviously more logical plus
>("+")?

Cos that's how Perl does it, and PHP was originally written in Perl?

It separates arithmetic operations from string operations; is it more logical
that "1"+"2" == "12", or 3? By picking a separate concatenation operator, you
remove the ambiguity and let you have both ways available.

"1"+"2" == int(3)
"1"."2" == string(2) "12"

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>Why did the designers of PHP decide to use period (".") as the string
>concatenation operator rater than the obviously more logical plus
>("+")?

More logical to me having the period.. but I come from a perl background
before I learned PHP..

Regards,
Chris

"Andy Hassall" <andy@andyh.co.uk> wrote in message
news:o10di0dn8s7bt49gfhb1oj4ass6jpm3tm9@4ax.com...
> Cos that's how Perl does it, and PHP was originally written in Perl?

AFAIK, PHP has also been in C. Who here has used the original PHP/FI?

Skeleton Man wrote:

>>Why did the designers of PHP decide to use period (".") as the string
>>concatenation operator rater than the obviously more logical plus
>>("+")?
>
>
> More logical to me having the period.. but I come from a perl background
> before I learned PHP..
>
> Regards,
> Chris
>
>

Originally PHP == Perl Hypertext Preprocessor. Later it was changed to PHP:
Hypertext Preprocessor. It was originally just a collection of Perl Scripts to
do "stuff" and was eventually formalized into it's own scripting language that
resembles it's Perl and C roots.

--
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Consultant - Not Available.
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:)

Michael Austin wrote:

> Skeleton Man wrote:
>
>>> Why did the designers of PHP decide to use period (".") as the string
>>> concatenation operator rater than the obviously more logical plus
>>> ("+")?
>>
>>
>>
>> More logical to me having the period.. but I come from a perl background
>> before I learned PHP..
>>
>> Regards,
>> Chris
>>
>>

and if I had read all of the history, see: http://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php
it's ORIGINAL name was:
Personal Home Page Tools/Forms Interpreter. I had only heard the response I gave
earlier.

> Originally PHP == Perl Hypertext Preprocessor. Later it was changed to
> PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It was originally just a collection of
> Perl Scripts to do "stuff" and was eventually formalized into it's own
> scripting language that resembles it's Perl and C roots.
>



--
Michael Austin.
Consultant - Available.
Donations welcomed. Http://www.firstdbasource.com/donations.html
:)

jonjo002@yahoo.com (Jonathan) emerged reluctantly from the curtain
and staggered drunkenly up to the mic. In a cracked and slurred
voice he muttered:

> Why did the designers of PHP decide to use period (".") as the
> string concatenation operator rater than the obviously more
> logical plus ("+")?
>
> //JJ

One of the major problems is that PHP, like Perl, allows arbitrary
typecasting between strings and numbers. This means that unless you
have specific operators for string concatenation and numeric
addition you're going to run into problems with variable typing.

For example:

echo "2" + "2";
echo 2 + 2;
echo 2 + "2";

All will produce the same result, but:

echo 2 . "2"; -> "22"
echo 2 . 2; -> "22"

Even though the numbers in the first and second example are
strings. PHP simply typecasts the strings to intergers before
performing the math. In the 4th and 5th examples PHP typecasts the
intergers to strings before concatenating them. In any language
with strict typing this would result in an error.

--
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