Those are literals, not variables.  My whole argument is about the ambiguity introduced when you are implicitly coercing variables.  But yes, if the language does not coerce between string and numeric types, it&#x27;s a non-issue.  I&#x27;m specifically talking about supporting coercion but continuing to use &#x27;+&#x27; for concatenation of strings (and ==&#x2F;!= for equivalence testing of strings as well).