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Supporting floats and their notation (scientific) would make PHP more consistent. We currently support this for long parameters in argument parsing, e.g.

$ php -r 'var_dump(intdiv("1e3", 1));'
int(1000)

Yet due to the use of strtol() here, we don't for the integer operators, nor for (int) and intval(). So this means that 3e3 is considered to be 3 for some integer operations and 3000 for others, which is not ideal.

Would it cause backwards-compatibility issues if we started allowing floats here? I don't think it would.