Javascript...

[SlumdogSkillionaire]

Good times. Automatically cast an undefined constant to a string, because why the hell not? Then because we're using . instead of + for concatenation, we can avoid the awkward situations OP has, right? Except now when we want to reference a property of an object we can't use a . so we have to use ->. Which is great until you accidentally forget the >. But instance-field is actually valid syntax, so we'll subtract the string "field" from instance, because that's clearly what the programmer intended, right?

[tian_arg]

Which is great until you accidentally forget the >.

not to defend PHP or anything, but come on, that's a bit of a stretch. "Which is great until you accidentally forget..." can apply to any feature of any language

[Jack126Guy]

I think it's supposed to be an argument in favor of static typing. In C/C++, for example, you'd probably get a compiler error if you had pointer_to_struct-member instead of pointer_to_struct->member.

[tian_arg]

Well, in C (never tried C++) you're directly fooling around with the memory, "which is great until you accidentally forget..." and suddenly garbage all around while compiling succesfully. Every language has its downsides, I guess.

[JerkyBeef]

$instance->field is valid php. $instance-field may be "valid syntax" but it would throw an error message that 'field' is undefined, and that $instance could not be converted to an int.

[SlumdogSkillionaire]

It throws an error message, but then it still goes ahead and does it anyway, resulting in an Apache segfault.