Lars Strojny has posted about a the new element that's been introduced in the PHP 5.3 branch - NOWDOC:

PHP 5.3 introduces a new syntax element, NOWDOC. If you know HEREDOC, NOWDOC is easy to understand: it is in fact HEREDOC taken literally. Whily variables are expanded in HEREDOC, in NOWDOC they are not.

NOWDOC is basically a HEREDOC except for one thing - no parsing is done inside of it, making it good for echoing out PHP code (that would otherwise need to be escaped all over).