Every now and then, someone comes up with ideas to "improve" PHP. Some of those ideas are actually quite good. The only problem is that PHP is about as obsessed with backwards compatibility as Windows is. Good luck getting the devs to accept a feature that will break scripts written in PHP 3. (Yes, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but libraries like phpass actually do claim to work in PHP 3, 4, and 5 without modification.)