This goes slightly against some of the original design philosophy of the language - data types can be very freely coerced, but the operations themselves have always been consistent in the types of values they yield. This is why a separate concatenation operator exists; so that x + y will always yield a numeric result and x # y will always yield a string, regardless of whether x or y is a number or a string. As opposed to overloading + for string concatenation like many other languages.
However, I feel OK with making exceptions when both operands are tables, since the result of any of these operations would otherwise be completely useless.
Set operations:
&: intersection|: union^: symmetric difference-: differenceList operations:
+: append (concatenate?)This goes slightly against some of the original design philosophy of the language - data types can be very freely coerced, but the operations themselves have always been consistent in the types of values they yield. This is why a separate concatenation operator exists; so that
x + ywill always yield a numeric result andx # ywill always yield a string, regardless of whetherxoryis a number or a string. As opposed to overloading+for string concatenation like many other languages.However, I feel OK with making exceptions when both operands are tables, since the result of any of these operations would otherwise be completely useless.