Aaron McGowan has posted his list of five things he wishes PHP could change (or even had) in future versions of the language.

Recently I have been hard at work trying to finish up a few major source packages and one application – but I have recently found myself thinking about how much better and more “grown” up PHP would be if it had a few things that other technologies such as C++ and C# have.

The five things on his list are:

• Operator Overloading
• Method and function Overloading
• Advancement of Namespaces
• Use of final keyword for class member variables
• 'Getters' & 'Setters' similar to C#'s for class member variables

Each point comes with a summary and a bit of code to show what he's talking about. He sees these things as major steps in PHP "growing up" and as features that could help it make a translation over from things like .NET simpler.