No. PHP's `+` operator always tries to convert to the number, and uses 0 (!!!) when it is not possible. (e.g. what is `"hello" + "world"`?) Having different operators hardly matters; operators should cause a visible and clear error if they were given unexpected operands. Python is better in that regard since it does not allow `str + int` and so on.
You're right, I forgot about this abomination. I retract any praise for PHP :) But I still think having one operator "+" for scalars, one like "&" for strings and another one like "++" for lists makes a lot of sense even in a dynamic language.
FWIW, I would not call this "coercion", I'd call this "destruction": while I personally prefer languages that statically don't allow even-potentially-lossy conversions (such as string to number, or float to int) without explicit syntax bounding the error, languages that blow up at runtime if you try to numeric-add "hello" yet accept the string "0" without complaint are "acceptable" in a way that PHP (and MySQL) simply destroying data (whether by replacement or truncation) and returning/storing garbage in an attempt to satisfy the required type constraints is not :/.
