Why do characters get interpreted as algebraics?

[Tim Wessman]

Because + was overloaded to mean "concatenate" for several items (strings included) which is handy for use in cases when you are manually building a list, but has generated a whole other series of problems in which users try to use a list in a function such as << -> X 'X^2+2' >>
and get this: { 1 2 3 } => { 1 4 9 2 }

You have to replace the + with ADD( ) in order for it to work properly.

Hence why we reversed it on prime so you could actually use lists in algebraic objs...