PHP config quark with if statements

Ok this is weird on my development server if I am running a test on a script and shorthand a if statement like so:

if($_GET['cat']){ ...

Instead of a more pragmatic way like so:

if(isset($_GET['cat'])){ ...

I will get errors stating that

Notice: Undefined variable: pwdmsg in C:\wamp\www\myfile\decrypt-text.php on line 16

Just wondering if anyone would know what this could be not a big deal really because I only do it when I am testing a theory or trying to check something it is just an annoyance.

Oh and please don't ding my question if it's something totally stupid or like "...even n00bs know that!" I just know it doesn't do it on my live server but does on my dev server.

My basic dev-server info:

PHP 5.3.0 Apache 2.2.11 MySQL 5.1.36

PHP exts: * Core * 开发者_如何学JAVAbcmath * calendar * com_dotnet * ctype * date * ereg * filter * ftp * hash * iconv * json * mcrypt * mysqlnd * odbc * pcre * Reflection * session * SPL * standard * tokenizer * zip * zlib * libxml * dom * PDO * openssl * SimpleXML * wddx * xml * xmlreader * xmlwriter * apache2handler * curl * gd * imap * mbstring * mysql * mysqli * Phar * pdo_mysql * pdo_sqlite * mhash

I'd say your error_reporting is configured differently.

http://de.php.net/manual/de/errorfunc.configuration.php#ini.error-reporting

On dev-systems you often do

error_reporting(E_ALL);

while on live-systems mostly E_ERROR is set to avoid output which is not user-relevant.