ugly dynamic typing bug

In PHP, '0e00' == '00'. No, really. It's sick. Led to the nastiest bug I've ever seen in our hexadecimal permissions bitmasking at work: over a quarter of the time (whenever the hexadecimal string started with one or more zeros followed by a number greater than eight), permissions were wiped out. Fortunately, the bitmask is only a cache, so we didn't lose any data, but it was quite confusing. That'll teach me to use strict checking more often.

Update: after playing around with it a little more, we realized that it's interpreting it as scientific notation, not octal. (See php.net: string conversion to numbers.) The conversion itself is reasonable; the ridiculous part is comparing two strings and converting them both to floats.