Operators and types

Ruby and Python overload the + operator for a large number of things, the most common ones being addition of numbers, concatenation of strings, and concatenation of tuples. Very different things are represented by the same syntax. In Perl these three roles are occupied by three different operators (+,. and ,). For that matter almost all operators for numbers are separated from operators on strings in Perl. This causes is one of the most common misconception among non-natives about Perl's typing system: it's not weakly typed. This piece of code:

my $foo = "1";
return $foo + 0;

does not cause an implicit type conversion, nor is the last statement in any way ambiguous. The addition operator causes an explicit conversion of its argument. It's not an implicit one for a simple reason: it's the Perl idiom for converting any variable to a number.

I think this is an excellent example of the waterbed theory of complexity. To reduce the number of operators in the language Python and Ruby use runtime polymorphism on data whose behavior is already known to the programmer (not to the compiler) at compile time. I cannot think of real-world code where you don't know if your variable is a number, a string or a tuple but want to do addition/concatenation nonetheless. It is trading semantic clarity for syntactic clarity. It's a valid choice, just as Perl's choice of separating them. I think a lot of rubyists and pythonistas fail to see that their choice has its disadvantages too.