Why PHP casts two numerical strings to numbers before [loosely] comparing them?

Question

I browsed through several similar questions, but they all only state the fact:

If ... comparison involves numerical strings, then each string is conve

Answer 1

Ah, finally I got it. It was quite stupid of me.

Comparison involves not only "is equal" but also "less than" and "greater than". And for the latter two it is obviously critical to cast numerical operands before comparison, because numbers often being represented in PHP as strings, and 11 have to be greater than 9 even if both stored in strings.

So, as compare_function() does all the comparisons at once, returns either 1, 0, -1 to tell if first operand is bigger, equal or less than second respectively - well, it's fairly explains, why operands being cast.