[Tim]
It's certainly caught errors for me, and especially when introducing Perl programmers to Python, where "they expect" string+number to convert the string to a number, apparently the opposite of the arbitrary choice Paul prefers.
[Ping]
It's not arbitrary -- the decision is made according to the type of the *operator* rather than the type of the operands.
anything + anything returns a number anything . anything returns a string
Of the languages discussed, this is true only in Perl. The other languages map "+" to the string meaning, so it's arbitrary wrt the universe under discussion. Toss Icon into the Perl camp on this one, btw. Within Perl, that "+" means numeric addition and "." string catenation is also abitrary -- it could just as well have been the other way around. Perl simply aped Awk's arbitrary <wink> choice for what "+" means.
So "34"+0 converts to a number and 34."" converts to a string (i've seen both idioms fairly often).
Yes, & about as often as you see explicit str() or int() calls in Python. It's not a question of not needing the functionality, but of how to spell it (both!).
... there's really no excuse for not being explicit.
i-think-that's-what-i-said-the-first-time<wink>-ly y'rs - tim