According to this new post from Christian Stocker today, PHP is "(most presumably) getting namespaces".

If you're not subscribed on the internals mailinglist of PHP, you may have missed a (most of the time very ridiculous) discussion about namespaces in PHP. The important part of the whole discussion is, that it looks like PHP 6 is getting namespaces. I don't care that much about namespaces, I prefix my classes anyway, but it's a nice to have certainly.

The annoying part of the discussion (with dozens of redundant posts) was about which namespace separator should be used. [...] Anyway, at the end it boils down to either :: or ::: or as separator, the double colons have some technical limitations, the backslash looks somehow strange.

For those that aren't sure what "namespaces" refers to, think about this example: two PHP files both have the function read() in their classes. If you wanted to use things from both clases at the same time, it'd be impossible - one read() would override the other. Namespaces would allow you to separate them out, referring to them as seperate, distinct items in their own classes...