Harry Fuecks wonders in this new post on the SitePoint PHP Blog "how strict is your dynamic language?"

Considering the "big four" dynamic, procedural languages; Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby, to an extent they're much of a muchness, offering only small variations on the same theme (ignoring PHP's lack of support for functional-style programming). But sometimes little things make a big difference, and perhaps most of all when your code is given input to handle which it wasn't designed for. Knocked up a simple example to compare them in this area...

He compares four languages - Perl, PHP, Ruby, and Python - by giving, for each, code examples and what the output would be, including what would error out. These examples help to illustrate his final points:

• where is the point when a fatal error should be raised?
• what is it the languages should actually complain about?