It helps to understand things better if we first talk about why there was the need for this API. It all has to do with the way PHP as a language is, compared to others, and that is loosely typed. This means that in PHP it is very difficult to use native language constructs to rely on the type of certain data or understand more about that data, as opposed to languages like Java or Python.
The difference between the string "1" and integer 1 is a very common example. We are often afraid of using the === sign to compare them because we never know what they actually come back as from the database or wherever. So, we either use == (which is not really good) or forcefully cast them to the same type and hope PHP will be able to get it right. ...
