Many PHP data types (such as mysqli etc) have been made into objects, and I agree 100% that it's silly to do this with strings. Ease of string manipulation is a

Many PHP data types (such as mysqli etc) have been made into objects, and I agree 100% that it's silly to do this with strings. Ease of string manipulation is a PHP strong point. You'll be giving PHP devs a loaded gun by allowing them to register primitive types (as proposed by nikic). Most frameworks would add to them, but I know some people would change default behaviour to 'fix' issues such as db character encoding issues which would make debugging hell.