JS vs PHP: assignment operator precedence when used with logical-or

Question

(PHP has || and OR. JS only has ||.)

JS. According to MDN || has higher precedence than =<

Answer 1

The expression $a || $a = 1; is equivalent to this:

if ( $a != true ) {
    $a = 1;
}

A very common variant on the idea is used for poor-mans debugging:

$debug = true;

// Thousands of lines of code

$debug && printf("Foo: {$foo}");

// More code

$debug && printf("Bar: {$bar}");

In this paradigm, only the $debug statement needs to be set to true/false to enable/disable debugging. I'm not advocating this type of debugging, but I've seen it quite a few times.