I get why Java has both Strings and StringBuffers. There are advantages to each, and times when you want to use one rather than the other.
Like, if you're building a long string up out of a lot of little pieces, it's a whole lot more efficient to do it with a StringBuffer, which is designed for that kind of thing, than do it with Strings, because they're immutable and the '+' operator gets translated invisibly into a temporary StringBuffer and some calls to append(), so why not do it that way explicitly in the first place, right?
So, given that the number-one usage of StringBuffer is almost certain to be to concatenating a bunch of Strings together, and given that StringBuffer is just as much a part of the Java language core as String, and given that you can use the '+' and '+=' operators on Strings...
Why in the name of all that is holy is '+=' NOT aliased to 'append()' for StringBuffers?
Argh, I say. Argh.
