[ojnabieoot]

Not a PHP dev, but I read a lot of it for work: based on the example provided, I gather the PHP community accepts that the non-strict behavior of ‘switch’ was undesirable, but it would be too difficult to break the non-strict semantics in an existing construct.

Likewise, the fact that ‘match’ is an expression rather than a statement encourages stricter semantics: although it’s technically unrelated to the type coercion issue, ‘match’ expressions should be easy to reason about locally, which isn’t the case for switch statements. This idea is encouraged by the fact that ‘match’ branches can’t continue across multiple lines: although technically ‘match’ could mutate some complicated global state, the intended use case is a constant or a simple function - easy to understand, and relatively gotcha-free. Gotchas should go in a ‘switch’ statement.

Seasoned PHP devs aren’t going to accidentally use the brand-new ‘match’ statement without careful study, and I don’t think the inconsistency is too big of a deal for newer devs: the overall principle is that ‘match’ is safer than ‘switch’ but less powerful.