One doesn't need an operator for everything and the kitchen sink. Just use Concat and be done with it.
Speaking as somebody who has sold lots of compilers for different languages, I'd suggest that Pascal's robust string support in particular reliable handling of + as the string concatenation operator was a very big factor in its erstwhile success.
Make that more difficult to use, without providing a concise alternative, and it's yet another nail in the language's coffin.
And I fully appreciate that this isn't entirely FPC's doing, and that a lot of the responsibility for (arguably) messing things up rests with Borland's successors. But their interest is primarily in having a tool for their own use and in milking a commercial market, while FPC/Lazarus are the standard bearers in trying to keep the language alive and relevant.
I'm sorry if that appears unnecessarily harsh. But the fact of the matter is that no number of sexy modern "computer-sciency" extensions will compensate for screwing up the underlying philosophy of the language as thrashed out by Wirth, UCSD and Borland in their early days, and I'm sure that I'm not the only user embittered by having spent far too much time fiddling with it rather than following popular opinion- and the jobs market.
MarkMLl