The following is a comment I made on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7aiex/php_forked/c0648fo http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/

The following is a comment I made on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7aiex/php_forked/c0648fo http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7aiex/php_forke...) some time ago on the subject of PHP being forked: As I tend to work with php a lot I often think about how to make PHP better and given that I like functional programming, more functional. Here are a few of the ideas I've thought up: Putting a $ in front of a symbol, e.g. $var is equivalent to defining and requiring that variable to be within, and only within, the current lexical scope. Given that within PHP, if/for/while/switch statements don't create new lexical scopes, everything would still work as is. The benefit would be to say that $ is no longer required such that variables could now be accessed without $, as is the case with functions. A symbol without a $ would be one that goes to each parent scope and either looks for the existence of a symbol. This is consistent with how current PHP functions works because currently all PHP functions belong to the global namespace, ie: they all are part of the root scope. So, this establishes that variables don't need to be preceded by $, and that $ is an operator that says look at the local symbol table for variables. The above model sets the stage for variables being passed down through child scopes and functions as well. That would all for proper closures that don't require parent scope variables to be used be explicitly defined. This also means that functions defined within functions (legal PHP) would not be put into the global namespace (this is inconsistent with previously versions of PHP). Finally, most symbols will either be values (in the cases of scalars, arrays, etc), instances (in the case of class instances), references, resources (function resources, other resources), or a few other data types that PHP currently supports. So, the symbol 'substr' is a function resource to the substr() function and '$substr' is only defined within the root scope as the same function resource. The idea of function resources is consistent with how PHP 5.3 implements anonymous functions. ex) If within the current scope one defines '$substr', then both 'substr' and '$substr' will point to that something else within the current scope and all subscopes. ex) If '$substr' is not defined in the current scope and one redefines 'substr' in the current scope then the actual 'substr' reference is changed for all scopes after that. </braindump>