PHP
===
What can I say? It's `Personal Home Page Tools
<http://www.php.net/manual/en/history.php.php>`__. That's what it is good for.
Personal home pages where you inject dynamic stuff into static HTML. But not
for much more. Unfortunately I am forced to "work" with this language and here
I collect some Nice Features (tm) that I found over time.

System Exit
-----------
Scripts should exit with 0 on success and 1 on error. Good enough for most
cases as you can put detailed messages on stdout or stderr respectively. See
http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exitcodes.html.

PHP::

    php <<EOF
    <?php
    exit("Sure, give me a string and I exit with 0! HAHAHA ha ha...\n");
    EOF
    echo $?
    # prints 0

How a real programming language does it::

    python <<EOF
    import sys
    sys.exit('What's that? A string? Are you stupid?')
    EOF
    echo $?
    # prints 1

Here comes the funny part. PDO replaces the Exception code with a string [1]_
and Symfony 1.4 has the following code in its cli.php::

    // ...
    catch (Exception $e)
    {
      if (!isset($application))
      {
        throw $e;
      }

      $application->renderException($e);
      $statusCode = $e->getCode();

      exit(is_numeric($statusCode) && $statusCode ? $statusCode : 1);
    }

So any task that dies because of an SQL Error returns with exit code 0. Good
luck finding this in your CI jobs.

.. [1] http://us1.php.net/PDOException#95812