N has been proposed as a keyword for string concatenation. Like so:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?

I HAZ A AGE ITZ 31
I HAZ A SAYING ITZ "Bobcatz iz " N AGE

VISIBLE "LOLCAT SAYZ: " N SAYING N "!! LOL!!1!"
KTHXBYE

What about WIF (with)? As in:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?

I HAZ A AGE ITZ 31
I HAZ A SAYING ITZ "Bobcatz iz " WIF AGE

VISIBLE "LOLCAT SAYZ: " WIF SAYING WIF "!! LOL!!1!"

KTHXBYE

It has LOLCAT precedence. Peter

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There are many things that would fit here. A simple comma would also do,

VISIBLE "LOLCAT SAYZ: ",saying,"!! LOL!!1!"

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I'll toss my vote in with WIF… it's not punctuation and it's unlikely to be used as anything else (except other types of concatenation–arrays maybe?) — Kyle, 2007/05/30 17:24

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Another alternative might be XD..

VISIBLE "LOLCAT SAYZ: " XD omgwtfbbq XD "!! LOL!!1!"

— shox, 2007/05/30 18:29 BST

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N is evil. -N- or N' (N-apostrophe) would be better, if the punctuation is OK. I've also seen ANDZ, but then you might as well have AND. Perhaps AN or AN' (AN-apostrophe?)

The XD Emoticon as operator is very clever, but it obsfucates unecessarily IMHO. — Church Tucker, 2007/05/30 18:44

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What's your objection to evil? When I started endorsing N (thought it might be concatentation, now leaning towards it being a conjunction, where you might use a comma in some languages), I said evil as a complement. :D — Adam, 2007/05/30 19:30

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I meant evil as in confusing (N reads like a variable.) There's enough confusing languages out there already.

— Church Tucker, 2007/05/30 19:48

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Why do we need a concatenation operator?

We can have automatic concatenation of adjacent strings or variables:

I HAS A NUMBER ITZ 32
LOL "MY NUMBER IS " NUMBER

There's also the option to escape variables within a string, although that probably requires some puncutation in form of an escape character, and even if that happens it doesn't really solve the problem when we want to concatenate a string returned from a function or class call.

Otherwise, I would have to lean toward just using AND; the N and WIF are much too confusing to read.

If we use punctuation, I would prefer to concatenate with a period (a'la PHP) instead of a comma.

— xrestassuredx, 2007/05/30 20:48

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Automatic concatenation makes a lot more sense, but the N is funny (yes, and very evil). Could it be optional syntax, sort-of like optional variable typing?

— wohali, 2007/05/30 21:38

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I like the automatic concatenation a lot.

CONLOLCAT seems like it should be a reserved word. Perhaps for files?

— Church Tucker, 2007/05/31 05:26

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Aren't we figuring out the language that lolcats use to power their serverz? Of course N is evil, and of course that's why they use it! :)

— Garoo, 2007/05/31

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Rather than using N or WIF as concatenation operators, per se, how about they act as predefined string variables that can be used with our automatic concatenation? Say N represents a single space and WIF represents a tab character. Maybe ALSO is a new line. This also lets us get rid of concatenating ugly ” ” and trailing spaces within strings.

I HAS A NUM ITZ 10
I HAS A WORDZ ITZ "HALO THAR"

LOL "Y" N WORDZ
BTW this says "Y HALO THAR"

LOL NUM WIF 20 ALSO 100 WIF 400
BTW this says "10   20
BTW            100  400"

1. – xrestassuredx, 2007/05/31 13:51