[giaour]

I believe there was some discussion of using the same strict declaration as javascript ('use "strict";'), but there's already an "easter egg" in PHP that causes your program to exit and prints out something like "I think you're using the wrong language."

For some reason, this Easter egg was deemed too important to displace with an actual language construct.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Well, there's also the fact that something that changes the language behaviour really should be a pragma and not a magic import statement.