In Perl, '.' is not property access. I'm not trying to imply '.' is the best solution for a language where it's already in use, but that a separate, unambiguous symbol would be better. For example, Perl 6 moved to using '.' for calling methods, and uses '~' for concatenation. It's not like just changing '+' is sufficient anyway, there is still string equivalence to consider (outlined in my other replies).