As a working programmer who has to use PHP, I just use === all the time and have long since moved on from even thinking about the insanity of PHP's == operator. Kinda like JavaScript programmers.
This. PHP's "==" is yet another trap of incompetent language design and almost all code that ever used it does the wrong thing for some inputs. $x == $y && $y == $z doesn't even tell you that $x == $z, much less that $a[$x] == $a[$y].
