There are many of us who cannot switch to another server side language, and would like a syntactic sugar on top of PHP.<p>What kind of features would you like in such a language?
1. uniform function names and parameter orders. for example searching functions.<p>2. better way to define stdClass objects (json-esque). other than (object)array('foo'=>'bar').<p>3. chaniable interfaces for lots of stuff that currently requires storing results in temp vars.<p>4. have closures automatically "use" all local scope variables without needing to explicitly define them (like js) - this could be problematic though if you expect to reuse variable names...<p>have anything implementing all necessary array and iterator interfaces be passable to functions that take arrays. this is really a core language feature though, not sugar.<p>there is a great list of warts you can start itching here: <a href="http://phpsadness.com/" rel="nofollow">http://phpsadness.com/</a>
Not really needed now that PHP 5.4 has it by default (though in reality it'll be a while before 5.4 is default), but I'd use it if it let me do the following:<p>$foo = MyFunction()[2];<p>It's the one feature in PHP 5.4 that made me genuinely happy.<p>Another thing I'd love is a doctype of sorts for PHP. So I could go:<p><?php
uses "5.1.2";
....<p>and then the PHP engine will treat itself as if it is PHP 5.1.2 or whatever. Yeah, not going to happen ever, but it'd be nice.