I don't see what your confusion is with my confusion! Something like "this thing is true about those languages where it's true" would be a totally worthless th

I don't see what your confusion is with my confusion! Something like "this thing is true about those languages where it's true" would be a totally worthless thing to say: it communicates zero actual information. It doesn't even say there actually is any one language (apart from Swift itself) that satisfies it. Why would the article include an empty statement like that? Even if it's conceivable that it does, surely it's reasonable for me to ask if there's an alternative interpretation that actually had some useful meaning? > what else would it mean? It could be that "languages like Swift" refers to a collection of related languages which are pretty obvious if you're familiar with them regardless of this overflow stuff. That is actually the more obvious interpretation to me, because saying that they all share the same overflow behaviour would be meaningful non-trivial information. I think that's a reasonable thing to think given that "language like X" makes sense for a lot of languages. Maybe Java wasn't the best example, but if someone said "lisp-like" languages or "JavaScript-like languages" you might have an idea what they mean. As I said, I'm not familiar with Swift so for all I know "Swift-like" could make sense too. But it raises the question: what languages would that phrase include? That's why I asked.