In Perl + is always addition, and concatenation has a different operator
Except when it isn't. Blessed types can overload operators - and then it's the type of the operand(s) that determine what's going to happen.
the symbol determines the operation, not the type
Except when it doesn't. | and & do behave differently depending on their operands - and it's more complicated than whether it's a number or a string; it'll depend on some internal flag. But more important is the context. Some operators behave wildly different in scalar and list context - but they have the same symbol(s).

In reply to Re^2: Why Perl by JavaFan
in thread Why Perl by madhugopala

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