There's an outstanding request for better array syntax. It's been out there for over 3 years and received a lot of support from the community. At least one implementation has been submitted. But the core dev team rejected the idea, as they are convinced having second syntax available would harm ease of use (and thus popularity) of the language.
In general, some aspects of PHP will not be fixed/improved for reasons of either:
* backward compatibility, or
* incompatibility with the vision of the language by the core dev team.
This is being revisited as per the PHP 5.4 TODO. My guess is it'll happen this time around, and I voted against it previously (but changed said vote). https://wiki.php.net/todo/php54
In general, some aspects of PHP will not be fixed/improved for reasons of either:
* backward compatibility, or
* incompatibility with the vision of the language by the core dev team.
http://marc.info/?t=121142259100001&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?t=119995974300003&r=1&w=2