How to make PHP less forgiving

It's hard not to love PHP: fast, powerful, and useful for anything from quick web scripts to major applications. The trouble is, PHP is just too forgiving for my taste. I've been working with PHP recently and occasionally made some silly errors (my excuse: it was late). I mostly work in other languages, so from time to time I would forget that in PHP variables all begin with a $ character. In other words, I wrote code like this:

$err = 0;
 if (err)

 {

     print("<b>No match with this username and password. Please try again.</b>");

 }

Unfortunately for me, the code ran fine. PHP sees err as an undefined constant which it assumes has a string value of 'err', so the if condition passes. For those used to strongly-typed languages such as C,Java or C#, this kind of error is unexpected, as in those languages the equivalent code will not even compile. Silent errors are particularly dangerous, since they are more likely to make it into production code with possibly calamitous consequences.

I guess the solution is not to make errors like that; but if you are like me, anything the tools can do to help catch errors is welcome. One possibility is to change the error_reporting value in php.ini. If you set it to a strict setting like this:

error_reporting  =  E_ALL | E_STRICT

then PHP will report likely problems in a manner that even a tired programmer will notice:

Check out the comments in php.ini for a description of the options. You would likely only use a strict setting like this in your development environment, not in production.

A snag with this approach is that many PHP libraries out there do not expect such a strict setting and will throw up all sorts of warnings. It wasn't a problem for me, as on this occasion all the code was mine.

As an aside, I've enjoyed working with PHP. I used to find that it almost encouraged spaghetti code, but the object-orientation introduced in PHP 5.0 has made it easier to structure applications in a way that I like. I've also started using the PHP Development Tools (PDT) in Eclipse. If you use this together with an instant PHP environment such as XAMPP, it is easy to set up a desktop for PHP development with luxuries like syntax highlighting, code-completion, and step-through debugging. Taking all these things together, I've found that most of my objections to using PHP no longer apply.