It's a shame. C made the precedence blatantly wrong so a few thousand lines of legacy code wouldn't have to be updated.

And then everyone decides their own languages will copy it forever.

That should give a warning at least because it (and this is probably a C thing) treats or implicitly casts a boolean true / false to a 0/1. You shouldn't be able to do PORTA & true.

One more for my list of "why I don't like C".

Depending on what version of C you are using, there are no "boolean" values.

X != Y returns an integer value, no "implicit cast" required for &.

Implicit casts are both convenient and evil. JavaScript deserves its own place for it.

I've never understood why any language does this. To save a few keystrokes? Code is much more read than written.

Javascript and PHP deal with HTML, where input forms can only request text* but are often used for numbers, so the conversion rules are an attempt to automatically treat numbers as numbers instead of forcing programmers to always do the conversion themselves (as other frameworks rely on instead).

With this kept in mind, I've personally found almost all the implicit conversions in both languages to be intuitive.

* You can limit the values to numerics, and nowadays use attributes to handle javascript, but that wouldn't help PHP where it gets encoded to querystring anyway.

In most cases, up or down casting 32 and 64 bit integers would be a shitton of work that barely adds anything. A similar case could be made for casting ints to floats (i.e. 2 + 3.1 should just work).

Beyond that though, most implicit casts are just bad.