If we are being pedantic, what is going on here is not type coercion.
If it were type coercion, we would expect the add function to have either of these two behaviours:
- coerce the input arguments to strings, i.e. implicitly accept two strings and return another string
- coerce the input arguments to integers, i.e. implicitly accept two integers and return an integer
However, that is not what is happening here.Of course, in Javascript it is implemented as a function that takes the theoretical "Any" type and decides what do do at runtime. But in a statically type language, the equivalent mechanism would be dynamic/multiple dispatch (or a static overload, possibly in combination with a generic/template method) -- not type coercion.