Quick list of things that bug me in PHP that we should sort out:

• Unicode from the start. (Not sure what this means, but we'll work that out).
• Make arrays easier to handle. $arr = []; and $slice = $arr[0:2]; and things should work.
• Consistent integers. No difference in INT_MAX from 32 to 64 bit. Same for other types.
• If we do type juggling, really, really, pedantically clear conditions for what gets converted to what and when.
• Thread safety everywhere?
• A nice, easy to use, concise native API that makes gluing other libraries into place really easy. See gobject introspection, etc. Ability to introspect a library and load it at runtime would be nice (I think Python can do this).

More thoughts:

• Make array and dictionary separate types.
• Namespacing using C++ style "namespace { }" etc., includes using C preprocessor style "#include <>" etc.
• Only one name for any given type. No "int", "integer", "long", "short" nonsense.
• All floating-point numbers in double-precision
• Native direct-to-C interface, need to be careful about memory layout of structures.