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Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:53:56 +0200
To: Greg Beaver <cellog@php.net>
Cc: Stefan Walk <stefan.walk@gmail.com>,php-dev <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] why is '01' == '1.'?
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

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