[jhgb]

Off the top of my head, I struggle to come up with situations where you'd need an $ to distinguish class names or function names syntactically. Hell, in Lisp I can do (let ((length (length seq-1))) ... (length seq-2) ... ) just fine and it still works as expected, so no special characters necessary either.

Plus, to have different scoping rules was considered a good idea? Weird scoping issues were why I gave up on Ruby fifteen years ago; perhaps it was a good idea that I got never that far with PHP. But I'm intrigued now; what exactly are the scoping differences in question?

[megous]

TBH, I don't know lisp and I have no clue what you just wrote. Someone new to PHP can just be told $something is how variables look like. And they will recognize variables forever from then on. What's a variable in that lisp code, or in any general lisp code? I have no clue at first glance.

I didn't say it's necessary for the parser, but it's useful for the learner/user.

[withinboredom]

You can do:

$strlen = 'strlen';

echo $strlen('test');

I’ve also seen things like this:

$return = ...

You can’t use a keyword as a variable in most other languages.