There's no reason for arrays to be objects if PHP wants to be a procedural language like C. In the days of PHP4 it was a procedural language and that design mad

There's no reason for arrays to be objects if PHP wants to be a procedural language like C. In the days of PHP4 it was a procedural language and that design made total sense. However nowadays nobody uses PHP as a procedural language, they use it as an object-oriented language. In that context it is extremely strange to have this procedural API still hanging around for "old" types.