Why a full stop, “.” and not a plus symbol, “+”, for string concatenation in PHP?

Question

Why did the designers of PHP decide to use a full stop / period / \".\" as the string concatenation operator rather than the more usual plus symbol \"+\" ?

Is there

Answer 1

Douglas Crockford thinks that + for Concatenation is a Bad Idea:

JavaScript has its share of design errors, such as the overloading of + to mean both addition and concatenation with type coercion