PHPeverywhere has a new posting this morning dealing with PHP5 and some of the advancements and new features that it will include (like the try/catch functionality, private variables, and private methods as well).

Some of the new PHP5 features are extremely valuable and useful. For example, treating objects as references, and integrating of the SPL extension so that we can treat any class as a collection and iterate over it using foreach(). However there are pros and cons to every design decision. [...] This is purely speculative, but I cannot help but wonder whether some of PHP5's design decisions are either copycat reactions to other languages, or an attempt to improve copy protection in PHP?

This post suggests some interesting ways that PHP might, in fact, be going in the future. Who's to say that one day, the PHP dev team won't include a patch that will change the face of PHP forever...