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

This doesn't answer the question, just wanted to share something.

From PHP Manual: String Operators, someone posted this which I find rather interesting. Notice how the space plays a part in the output.

Excerpt:
If you attempt to add numbers with a concatenation operator, your result will be the result of those numbers as strings.