There are a lot of things that I like about PHP. For instance, the addition operator (+) is different from the concatenation operator (.). This prevents the common ambiguity in weakly-typed languages of "'1' + 1".
PHP has a lot of quirks though - due to its highly "organic" development. Variable variable names are a prime example:
$a = 'hello'; $$a = 'world'; echo "$a $hello"; // prints "hello world"
Confusing, no? Also, the object-oriented stuff seems tacked on (probably because it was tacked on) and the function to escape text so that it is HTML-safe is called "htmlspecialchars()". For a language whose main function is to output web pages, couldn't they have thought up a shorter function name?
