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Comment by babyrainbow | Hacker News Reader

>Well, ctype_digit takes strings, not integers...

The problem is that the behavior is not consistant. Php is some parts c, some parts java and some part perl. That is the problem. It takes a encyclopedic knowledge of the documentation to know what part you are dealing with. And even that might not help you sometimes, because the documentation can be plain wrong at places...

>anyone who actually cares about what he does knows you have to check equality with ===

Can you write php code to store some string to string mapping in a php array and further down, check if a particular key exist in that array?

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If you know C, you can identify pretty well what are the (thin) PHP wrappers around the C routines. Java influenced the OO design, so you know where to find it, and Perl is mostly, well, PCRE. It's not consistent, but it's not _that_ hard to navigate.

Well, It is not that easy. For example, take the function strlen(). You can see that it is a wrapper for the C function.

So can you expect that it will behave like the c function, accepting strings only? No! It now accept both strings and integers. So you have part perl there.

Now take another function. ctype_digit(). I don't know where the name come from. You expect it to behave like strlen() accepting both strings and numbers. But no!

If you pass it a number, it won't even bat an eye (throw an exception or error), but it will just return gibberish...

Hope my point, that these influences are mixed together in a haphazard fashion, is a bit more clear now...

It's more about automatic type conversion than the API, though; numerics magically get converted to strings and vice-versa. This is convenient in some cases, especially for beginners who don't have to think about types, but it eventually bites you if you never realize what happens in your back.

The problem is that ctype_digit does not magically get converted to a string, it instead just returns gibberish.

If ctype_digit(100) magically got converted to ctype_digit('100'), that would not be a problem.

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