[prepend]

I try to make my analyses in something reproducible and then have it “still work” in Excel. So the strongly typed stuff is done elsewhere.

It’s funny though because so many people who crank on excel don’t know what types are. And don’t know what variables are. And don’t have the layers of mental abstraction that programmers who want types have and need.

So the expected protections don’t really happen. So while it’s nice to not convert “01” to “1” automatically, lots of errors will probably be caused by people trying to add “01” and “02” and getting “0102” and being super confused.

[gugagore]

I didn't realize you can do string concatenation with + .

[prepend]

You can’t in excel, but I was referring to if strong types the language could understand what to do with “+” for strings so could concat instead of fail.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I'd prefer it to fail rather than overload the `+` operator for unrelated types. VB gets few things right, but of the things it does get right: using the `&` operator for string concatenation makes far more sense than overloading `+`.

[IggleSniggle]

See also: why JavaScript is the way it is.