Why does this not surprise me about PHP?

I'm not sure if it's a PHP 5x thing, or if the PHP configuration was a bit more strict, but when I tested “Project: Leaflet [1]” on another server with PHP 5 (the development server is currently at PHP 4) I received a series of errors:

Notice: Undefined index: order in XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.php on line 382

I did some searching, and I found two fixes. One, the following line:

error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);

Or I can fix each instance, from:

if (isset($_POST['blah'] == 'foo') ...

to

if (isset($_POST['blah']) && ($_POST['blah'] == 'foo')) ...

And I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it's keeping muddleheaded programmers [2] honest, forcing them to actually think for a change. On the other hand, it sure is annoying having to check almost all variable references to see if the variable is defined or not …

Sigh.

=> [1] /boston/2008/02/05.1 | [2] /boston/2006/06/05.1

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