Your medical application should probably be using === for comparisons. I'm not defending PHP's language design, but I think it's pretty well known among professional PHP developers that you should almost always use === and avoid implicit type conversions.
Got me. How do old-school C programmers ensure they don't accidentally use = when they mean == ?
There are actually some decent commercial PHP IDEs, believe it or not. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are able to Warn on loose equality comparisons. I don't have much direct experience with them though.
