And yeah you are probably right on your 2nd comment as well. The language was created for doing one thing and one thing well: handling web requests. In that context the input is always strings and thus I suppose they took the path of trying to guess the most common use-case of input.

You mean, returns true, not returns false here, right?

I think I agree with the gist of your post — people often just use “common sense” when they can’t think of another reason. And then they act like somehow by issuing this invocation they are super smart.

Still, whether it should return true or false is the issue. That is an issue of the language design. Not a lot of other languages have gone PHP’s way, but I think this is because PHP was designed with form handling in mind, where it made sense in a lot of cases to “0″ as false. A lot of times the empty() function does exactly what I want, in other cases I want something like Rails’ “blank?” method.