Object literals and scalar type hints won't be in 5.5. Scalar type hints may be in the next version (it's a rather tricky topic). For object literals I don't see reason to add them at all (in PHP you can just use arrays ^^).
$data = {
firstName: "John",
lastName: "Smith",
age: 25,
address: {
streetAddress: "21 2nd Street",
city: "New York",
state: "NY",
postalCode: 10021
},
phoneNumber: {
home: {
number: "212 555-1234"
},
fax: {
number: "646 555-4567"
}
}
};
$data = (object) [
"firstName" => "John",
"lastName" => "Smith",
"age" => 25,
"address" => (object) [
"streetAddress" => "21 2nd Street",
"city" => "New York",
"state" => "NY",
"postalCode" => 10021
],
"phoneNumber": (object) [
"home" => (object) [
"number" => "212 555-1234"
],
"fax" => (object) [
"number" => "646 555-4567"
]
]
];
Telling people to use arrays and be done with it is the equivalent of implement a strpos function that may only accept a string that's 5 characters long — yes, theoretically you can work with that splitting your strings, but that's time consuming and a inconsistent behaviour (why would 10 character long strings be less of a citizen than 5 char long ones?)
Which thankfully aren't as painful now!
$cfg = [
'path' => '.',
'mask' => 655
];
$o = (object)[
'foo' => 'bar'
];
$o = (object)[
'foo' => function(){ print 'bar'; },
];
$o->foo();
call_user_func($o->foo);
$foo = $o->foo;
$foo();
Using __get/__set behaves the same way. Let's say $o is of SomeType that defines those magic methods. You can have a function foo on that type that is defined as a public method.
$o->foo(); // the actual instance method
$o->foo = function() { print 'bar'; };
$o->foo(); // same instance method
$foo = $o->foo;
$foo(); // prints bar
Edit: It also behaves the same way if you assign a function to a public field of a class (I'm using 5.4) so I actually support not allowing a method to be directly callable in this fashion because this would be the only case where this behavior would occur.