I really like the ...$param syntax. When we first created NOLOH (<a href="http://www.noloh.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.noloh.com</a>) back in 2005 we decided on $dotdotdot as a syntactic salt, but this is obviously much nicer. Also, by ref ... is really really nice. Very few cases where it's necessary, but having that is a pretty big deal.<p>Since PHP 5.3, PHP has gotten some really nice features, they've definitely been doing a pretty good job over the past few years.
I'm liking the variadic functions syntax. It's definitely better than requiring all extra parameters to be sent as arrays. Even if that's how they end up in the function.
Would REEEEEEALLY like to see readonly properties in classes.<p>They had a proposal a while ago to add getter and setter function support, which would be cool and would've allowed it (with some function overhead), but is probably a bit OTT for PHP.<p>readonly properties would allow you to make truly solid classes. You'd be able to lock them down from outside interference.<p>Methods could trust that property values hadn't been tampered with from outside, while still providing a way for outside code to read those values extremely quickly, without function overhead.<p>I think it's an awesome idea, especially since the getter/setter proposal failed. It's very PHPy, and it strikes a nice middle ground between fully public properties and private ones.<p>External code really shouldn't be able to mess with my class's internal properties anyway, it violates separation of concerns.
i would love to see them make an explicit BC break and fix everything listed at <a href="http://phpsadness.com/" rel="nofollow">http://phpsadness.com/</a>