Explicit, explicit, explicit. I'll take readability over brevity any day (and twice on Sundays) and I believe relying on implicit behavior and various forms of "black magic" hurts readability. Saving a few keystrokes for the sake of saving keystrokes is a false economy if it makes the code harder to read for the next poor sap who comes along and has to read it (which, guess what, may be the poor sap who wrote it in the first place!).