Noob question: Is all this typecasting normal?

[sprad]

On Jan 3, 6:41 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> The OP comes from a Perl background, which AFAIK allows you to concat
> numbers to strings and add strings to numbers. That's probably the (mis)
> feature he was hoping Python had.

That's correct -- and that's been one of the more difficult parts of
my transition. Learned C++ in college, spent a few years doing Perl,
and now all of a sudden type matters again. It's a very different
philosophy, but I'm determined to stick with it until I have an Aha!
moment and find something I can do more easily than I can with Perl.