PlusConcatenatesNumbers

DRAFT

Correction

Here is what's right.

In Python, the + operator is overloaded. The arithmetic plus operator adds two numbers (e.g., 1 + 2). The concatenation operator concatenates two sequences (e.g., the two strings "Hello" + "World").

However, Python does not have a plus operator that concatenates a string and a number. To concatenate a string and a number, one can convert the number to a string using str(), and then concatenate the two strings:

text = "The answer is "
number = 42
print(text + str(number))

The resulting expression tree looks as follows. While the variable number contains a number, the str() function converts that into the corresponding string. The plus operator then can simply concatenate two strings.

Value

How can you build on this misconception?

In other languages, for example in Java, the plus operator can indeed concatenate strings and numbers.