That's how I used to do it in C/C++ before it had a bool type, when it was necessary to canonize the value.

If that's too idiomatic, using return asbool($status) where that's an inlined function would be readable and just as efficient.

Note that it does a bit more than it does in a stronly-typed language. What if $status is not an int at all? The normal boolism is to treat undef and empty strings as false, also, and in one known case 0e1 is used as zero-but-true. The original test will be different from that; the !! idiom preserves it.

—John