Re: The need for strong typing...

The one problem with all your musings is that there is no such thing as an integer when it comes to transferring data over http. Everything comes as a string. What is done with these strings when they get to the application is what matters. It's not like there is an HTML form element like <input type=integer> or <input type=float>. All you have is <input type=text> when it comes to users entering data and passing it to you. I fail to see how strong typing helps you here at all. You are going to have to apply some sort of user-space rule once you receive the data. And that is quite easy to do with PHP. For your specific example you simply want to use the is_numeric() function. That will tell you definitively whether the data that came from the user is nothing but a numeric entity. -Rasmus