Re: why is '01' == '1.'?

At 16:33 15/12/2005, Greg Beaver wrote:

Stefan Walk wrote: See http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=23110 It's definitely a gotcha, especially if you use switch(){}, as there is no way to do strict type checking there. Please reconsider the decision to leave this bug open in PHP, any unexpected behavior in an operator as fundamental as == is VERY dangerous, and if used improperly could lead to security holes (i.e. unexpectedly, input that does not match could match a strict filter based on ==) I understand the rationale behind loosely typed comparison, and use it myself, but this is beyond loosely typed, it is explicitly changing type in an irrational way, as it only applies in certain cases.

Greg, A lot of thought has been put into the current behavior, which was decided upon probably around 8+ years ago. While I'm not positive we made the right decision back then (even though I think we did) - changing this behavior is completely out of the question. It's not a bug, it's a well-documented feature ("strings that look like numbers behave like numbers"), and changing it would effect an enormous amount of applications. In order to change such a fundamental behavior there have to be clear-cut compelling reasons, and no compelling reasons against - which is clearly not the case. Zeev