Absolutely, and it's something I consider somewhat of a liability in (e.g.) Scala. You can drive yourself crazy if you're not careful. However, I feel that doi

Absolutely, and it's something I consider somewhat of a liability in (e.g.) Scala. You can drive yourself crazy if you're not careful. However, I feel that doing the "implicit casting" thing only for the single, limited case of string concatenation strikes a happy medium between providing useful convenience and giving you enough rope to hang yourself with.