What are the benefits (and drawbacks) of a weakly typed language?

Question

I\'m a big fan of PHP and it\'s obviously a very weakly-typed language. I realize some of the benefits include the general independence of changing variable types on the fly

Answer 1

See this table, showing the results of the PHP == operator applied to pairs of empty or other principal values of various types, such as 0, "0", NULL and "". The operator is non-commutative, and the table is quite unintuitive, to say the least. (Not that it would make much sense to ask if a string is equal to an array, in fairness -- but you can do that in a weakly typed language, which is the pitfall, and may Turing help you if the language tries to "help" you.)