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

I guess it is so you can concatenate numbers with strings?

$i=100;
$str="hello";
$str2 = $str.$i

Since you don't declare variable types, with a + it could give a result of 100 instead of "hello100."