# Why are there all these strange stumbling blocks in Julia?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-are-there-all-these-strange-stumbling-blocks-in-julia/92644>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Tags:** syntax, python\
**Created:** [January 7, 2023, 6:19pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-are-there-all-these-strange-stumbling-blocks-in-julia/92644 "2023-01-07T18:19:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![adienes](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/adienes/32/37459_2.png) [@adienes](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/adienes)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2023, 7:25pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-are-there-all-these-strange-stumbling-blocks-in-julia/92644/7 "2023-01-07T19:25:54Z")

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Not really trying to pile on, but I just got curious so I compiled a list of string concatenation operators across a bunch of languages. If any of these are incorrect, blame ChatGPT 🙂

Some languages (`C,`, `Lisp`-y ones) do not have infix operators for string concatenation at all.

- `Maple` uses `||`
- `Mathematica` and `Gap` use `<>`
- `Agda`, `Idris`, `Erlang`, `Haskell`, `Elm`, `Zig` all use `++`
- `F#`, `OCaml` use `^`
- `Ada`, `Nim` use `&`
- `Fortran` uses `//`
- `Lua` has `..`
- `Perl` has `.`
- `Smalltalk` has `,`

And of course many popular languages use `+`, including `C++`, `Python`, `Java`, `Go`, `Ruby`, `Typescript`, `Rust`, `Solidity`, `R`, `Swift` etc.

So while it does seem to be true that `Julia` is a bit of an outlier in using specifically `*`, there are plenty of other examples of languages choosing to diverge from `+`.

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/why-are-there-all-these-strange-stumbling-blocks-in-julia/92644)._