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PHP actually handles much of the details when it comes to types, since it is a dynamically typed language. This is good and bad. The good is that manual typing can be a headache. The bad is that odd errors like this where the PHP interpreter handles a type wrong can be difficult to pinpoint. The opposite of dynamic typing is static typing, which means that every variable must be declared with its type before it can be used, and you can only store matching types in any given variable (you cannot store a floating-point number in an integer variable).

Personally, I prefer statically typed languages, but that is likely just because that is what I learned to program with.