Hi all, just another wild idea. I've been working a lot with PHP lately (boo!), and one of the things I have a love-hate relationship with in it is its string concatenation operator: . Counter-intuitively to Python, `.` is used to concatenate strings; `"str1" . "str2"` evaluates to `"str1str2"`. Even though it's kind of weird, I find the separation between addition and concatenation useful. In PHP, `"str1" + "str2"` evaluates to 0; `"str1" . "str2"` evaluates to `"str1str2"`. Obviously, in Python, `"str1" + "str2"` could not evaluate to 0, it should instead raise a TypeError. But it's more clear what is going on here: $content .= "foobar"; $i += 1; than here: content += "foobar" i += 1 I propose adding a dedicated operator for string concatenation. I don't propose `.` as that operator - that would break too much. My initial idea is to abuse the @ operator introduced for matrix multiplication to work for string concatenation when applied to strings. This would be an example result of that: >>> from numpy import matrix >>> matrix('1 2; 3 4') @ matrix('4 3; 2 1') [[ 8 5] [20 13]] >>> "str1" @ "str2" "str1str2" >>> "str1" @ 56 #str() is called on 56 before concatenating "str156" >>> 56 @ "str1" #str would also have __rmatmul__ "56str1" >>> content = "foobar" >>> content @= "bazbang" >>> content @= "running out of ideas" >>> content 'foobarbazbangrunning out of ideas' However, the operator does not necessarily have to be @ - I merely picked that because of its lack of use outside matrix math. What are your thoughts? Sincerely, Ken Hilton;