All languages have their idiosyncrasies. You can pick out some obscure aspect of any language and say $LANG sucks. Btw, PHP's behavior doesn't totally make sen

All languages have their idiosyncrasies. You can pick out some obscure aspect of any language and say $LANG sucks. Btw, PHP's behavior doesn't totally make sense to me either. But I'm willing to assume that its users and designers have thought this through and it makes sense for PHP's intended use cases, because I don't know PHP. Javascript (which most people on HN seem to like) also has similar issues (null vs. undefined, == and === etc). It got so bad that "Javascript: the good parts" had to be written to define a de-facto sane subset of the language. People are actually writing in Coffeescript (in part) to avoid Javascript's pitfalls. YMMV.