3 ms·

Nothing wrong with automatic coercion, as long as the rules are sane. In ruby, everything except false and nil is true. Easy. Unless you override the == metho

• PaulHoule 15y ago
  PHP's rules, like Perl, does what the programmer wants a high fraction of the time. Except when they don't. For instance, 0 == false isn't too crazy, it's like C. But automatic coercion of string values to ints makes "0" == false which is sometimes what you want and sometimes not. Practically this burns people in form validation code because often you want to test if a field is an empty string and if you do the obvious thing you can end up kicking out "0". When I write PHP I have my own "PHP on nails" library that has functions that smooth out most of the things that are wrong with the language, and one of them is a comparison operator that is somewhere between "==" and "===" that most frequently does what you want it to do.