see Bug #44990 for explanation

I don't recall PHP ever behaving that way.

So how do you alter a switch statement to use the identical operator instead of equivalency?

It seems somewhat odd that any text character would be equvalent to integer 0.  As I remember the chart it was something like:
0 == '0' true
0 == '' true
0 == null true
0 == false true
0 == 'text' false

Basically if we are going to treat any string as equivalent to 0, the switch statement becomes useless when iterating through arrays unless you first strip key names of integer 0.

This is quite ridiculous.  Can this 'feature' of PHP *please* be reconsidered?

I can see that it's no any logical explanation to keep this BUG unfixed! Status: Not a bug -> why??? It's not funny, so many years past.

I do love to use PHP and like that no needed to define variable types, but this is generic FAIL.

Come one guys, someone need to fix this, please.

My PHP version
PHP 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Jan 18 2013 23:45:59)

Maybe because that's not a bug... "It's not a bug, it's a feature".
Equality (==) and identity (===) are different, if for your use, equality is the 
best, just use it then.

I see this as the biggest inconsistency:
var_dump(0 == "uno"); // true
var_dump(0 == false); // true
var_dump(false == "uno"); // false

While perhaps not a bug by strict definition, I think it's definitely an error in 
design.

It seems object do behave the way one would expect strings to (furthering the 
inconsistency imo), as demonstrated by this example:

class Tester {
}
$tester = new Tester();

var_dump(0 == $tester); // false
echo "<br />";
var_dump(0 == false); // true
echo "<br />";
var_dump(false == $tester); // false
echo "<br />";

This is not about equivalency vs identical operators.  They have defined behavior working according to definition.

This is about the fact that the switch statement works using equivalency and there is no way to push it to use identical instead.  This leads to unpredictable results when you would expect a default case to execute but instead a "case 0" executes.  This is due to so many things proving "equivalent" to zero, including null.

There should be a way to push switch to use identical or a "switchs" statement for switch strict.