date('w') return type

I know I can just cast to int, but is it ok to return an string for things that can only be numbers? <?php // imagine today is sunday var_export(date('w') === 0); ?> prints false, but I expected it to return an int. Am I wrong? I imagine it's the same thing with the rest of date's return values. Btw, I don't hope it will be changed because it would probably break a lot of scripts. -- Juan Alonso This message represents the official view of the voices in my head