Matt Sparks has an interesting post to his site sharing something he'd like to see in PHP 8 (quite a ways off in the future but still worth thinking about): scalar objects.

Recently, I read an interesting article from Andrew Carter entitled Make PHP Great Again [cheap plug: this link was included in my most recent Newsletter]. In it Andrew brought up the topic of scalar objects. If you’re not familiar with scalar objects, they represent a single value (integer, boolean, string, etc.) that you can perform operations on*.

He shares an example of what it might look like in PHP and his response to a tweet from Nikola Posa about what features they'd like to see. He then spends the remainder of the post making his case for the inclusion of scalar objects and how it can help clean up some of PHP's own naming and functional inconsistencies.