I think having both type coercion and overloaded operators is not a good idea. Since JavaScript uses type coercion widely--and I agree with this myself--a bette

I think having both type coercion and overloaded operators is not a good idea. Since JavaScript uses type coercion widely--and I agree with this myself--a better solution would be to have + only do addition. As it, it tries to do too much: both numerical addition and concatenation. If all it did was addition, you could simply coerce both sides to numbers and return NaN if the conversion did not make sense. Of course, this would mean needing an extra operator for concatenation, but I think that would be fine. On the other hand, your approach would make sense if JavaScript did not try to coerce everything. In that case, having + act differently for different types would be a good option, and your ideas would fit right in. In short: the problem is not type coercion and not overloaded operators; the problem is combining the two in one language.