PHP core has very few datatypes. And many are really just Arrays. Not just "under the hood" but through public interfaces. The best example to show this is tha

PHP core has very few datatypes. And many are really just Arrays. Not just "under the hood" but through public interfaces. The best example to show this is that you can `foreach()` over an object. It wasn't a deliberate feature but rather an artifact of how objects are "syntactic sugar over Arrays" and how Arrays are really just hashtables. And it becomes problematic with the many exceptions that all the functions operating on Arrays have. Almost all important functions' documentation (edit: on arrays) goes something like "if the array key is a string, it will act like X, if it is a number it will act like Y". With some going like "if one of the keys is a string it will X, otherwise it will Y". And Y and X being rather different in return values, errors and such. I can understand that PHP has a really strong preference for strings - HTTP is only and all strings after all - but the mess around arrays is real, dangerous, and has bitten me, my companies and many of my clients many times over. For decades.