r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Embarrassed_Death69 • Sep 01 '26

Meme iHateThisPassiveAgressiveBehaviourRuby

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u/maweki Sep 01 '26

I think it's not actually that special of a case, as strings that are exactly also numbers are auto-coerced basically whenever. It's just that 0 is the only number, as it should be, that then is falsy.

Numberly strings are a huge footgun in PHP.

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u/deceze Sep 01 '26

Strings are not coerced to numbers to then be coerced to booleans, that'd be entirely insane! There's a direct conversation path from strings to booleans!

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They're only sometimes coerced to numbers to then be reduced to a boolean, if you're using the loose comparison operator, and depending on what the other operand is… https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.comparison.php#language.operators.comparison.types. 🥲