[development] Coding style update -- does the concat operator coding style make sense?

[Earl Miles]

Konstantin took some initiative after my umpteenth teeth-gnashing fest 
over the inconcistency of the concatenation operator in Drupal's coding 
standards.

Personally, I Don't Get It. Why does the . operator have a different 
coding standard than any other binary operator? Why does:

'foo'. $bar

make sense, but

3+ $bar

not make sense?

I don't quite get the special relationship between strings and the . 
operator that Drupal's coding standard espouses. Attempts to explain it 
to me have, thus far, failed. Also, I've never seen this standard 
anywhere else, not in any other language, nor anything even remotely 
like it.

Konstantin's patch to Drupal would remove this inconsistency and let us 
change this standard: http://drupal.org/node/245115