I'm going to have to disagree. Any programming language where string comparison works "normally" for everything except for certain magic string values is Wrong.

I'm going to have to disagree. Any programming language where string comparison works "normally" for everything except for certain magic string values is Wrong. Like, I see where they're going with it, but it's probably a source of undetected Heisenbugs on a significant proportion of PHP sites. Not just talking about password hashes and other security critical operations here, just good old bugs.