JoelPM

PHP Annoyance

I try to stay away from posts of the “10 Reasons Language X Sucks” nature because a language is just a tool and if you don’t like a certain tool, don’t use it. That being said, I’ve had to use the PHP tool a lot recently (in order to create a Java replacement) and the following code snippet annoys me:

'7' <= $someIntVar;

The above is legal PHP and the PHP interpreter just converts the quoted value to an integer before doing the less-than evaluation. It annoys me because it causes cognitive dissonance. The <= operator is numeric and only has meaning in the context of numbers, so seeing a quoted value on one side or the other feels like an error.