Informative: I believe the term you are referring to is Sigil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(comp

Informative: I believe the term you are referring to is Sigil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming) I actually never found having the dollar sign as a sigil was any problem. There are a lot of punctuation symbols used in programming that are not used the same way as they are used in English grammar. In English, you don't create a new paragraph for every line indented in, the ^ sign is not often used for exclusive or, % is not used for modulus, and * is not used for multiplication. You could also probably make a length function which returns strlen($str) if you really wanted to have $str->length.