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I don't understand the link with parent, nor why + would be bad, besides a) because language is naive about concatenation / allocation, and b) if the language allows / doesn't differentiate between a char 'x' and an integer, bc that would result in an integer addition instead of a concatenation.

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If you manipulate strings in code using "+" (string concatenation symbol) from a user input you'd be in a world of hurt where you either do a lot of regex (which is ugly and unmaintainable) or you limit the user input to known characters only (which would be a bad user experience and later on your manager would ask you to lift such constraint anyway because they want to support a new feature from now on). Therefore you use, for example, a stream and simply dump your user input in the stream buffer, as they come, and go with that stream in your code from that point on. This way you're future proof too if your manager wants a new feature to support, as example, Chinese and/or Japanese keyboard

Not OP, but I'm still confused. Is this assuming that the language is naive in its implementation of string concatenation so it screws up Unicode?

I'm just not sure what the syntax has to do with the semantics of string concatenation.

I’m even more confused now

Just so you know, Lua's concatenation operator is ".."

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