I don't think you got to the real problem here. Weak types are quite useful for some tasks, and of course they are nothing new. Languages that convert between i

I don't think you got to the real problem here. Weak types are quite useful for some tasks, and of course they are nothing new. Languages that convert between integer and string types automatically are well suited for text processing in general (including generating web pages dynamically). The problem with PHP's weak typing is PHP's hit-and-miss implementation. Check out AWK, another weakly typed language, for example: BEGIN{printf "%5.2f\n", ""} prints "0.00" as would be reasonable.