Ari_Rahikkala comments on Checking for the Programming Gear - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MBlume 08 September 2012 08:38PM

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Comment author: Ari_Rahikkala 16 September 2012 01:34:56PM 2 points [-]

To be fair, it's not really enough to know what types are to get this one right. You have to understand that the + operator is overloaded based on the types of its operands; that is, + actually means several different things, depending on the operand types. The experience people have of + meaning numerical addition might be interfering with their learning. Maybe if someone else's students had problems with it, they could try defining a function putTogether (a, b) and telling the students that it's a mysterious black box that does one arbitrary thing for numbers and a completely different thing for strings. Then you could leave revealing that it's actually the language's + operator that has this strange behavior for later.