Strongly-Typed Thinking
In computer science, we talk about programming languages being strongly- or weakly-typed. A strongly-typed language insists that variables be of one type: an integer, a floating-point number or a string. The stronger the typing, the less tolerant the language when you use the "wrong" type. At the extremes, a strongly-typed language might reject arithmetic between an integer (e.g. 13) and a floating point number (2.40). A weakly-typed language will offer some implicit type conversion. PHP, our language of choice, will do its best to promote strings of text into numbers if you write code that treats the value like a number (e.g. "2abc" + 3 is 5). This strong typing concept can be anthropomorphized like so. The strongly-typed language sees that you declared that variable as an integer. When you ask it to add…
