The why's and wherefore's were adequately covered by the responses before mine. My point was the broader one: when it comes down to your perception versus reality, you need to adjust your perception. It's like the periodic posts we get here about "why am I getting this 'Use of uninitialized string...' warning?" Um, that would be because your string is uninitialized. Read and listen to error messages, heed their warnings.

Update: I link to the debugger documentation (well, tutorial) very often in my responses. Program not behaving as expected? Want to know what's really going on? We have this marvelous tool that lets us see.