PHP's automatic string conversion
<p>I couldn't find any useful explanation as to why PHP's automatic string casting is a useful feature?  To me it seems like it can cause more bugs and issues than it solves.  Not to mention the extra CPU cycles it takes to check each string if it needs to be converted.  I can't think of any examples where this functionality is beneficial but perhaps I'm not being imaginative enough or I'm to used to using method calls like atoi or python's built in int() method.</p>

<p>Hopefully someone on here has an idea behind the rationale for this.</p>
