PHP database syntax/construct: can we make it better?

One thing about PHP that has always been kind of difficult is the way it accesses databases. I'm not necessarily talking about abstraction, but the way the syntax works which is mostly inherited from the PHP language structure. Here is an example of what I mean. I'll give one example of how PHP does a database query, and then a comparison to the way another "html-ish" scripting language accomplishes the same task. Example: selecting and displaying rows from a database. ---PHP:--- <? $link = mysql_connect("my_host","my_name","my_pass"); mysql_select_db("my_db",$link); $result = mysql_query("select first,last,addr from my_table",$link); while($row = mysql_fetch_row($result) { printf("%s, %s, %s<br>\n",$row[0],$row[1],$row[2]); } echo "there were ".mysql_num_rows($result)." records found.<br>\n"; ?> ---OTHER HTML-TYPE LANGUAGE:--- <HOST = "my_host"> <USER = "my_name"> <PASS = "my_pass"> <DB = "my_db"> <SQL "select first,last,addr from my_table"> $first, $last, $addr<br> </SQL> There were $loop records found. Of course each syntax has it's pros and cons. PHP is much more extensible, but the latter is quite easy to read and quick to implement without the need to construct for() and while() loops. Is there any way to make PHP a bit easier to work with, instead of constantly having to create while loops, calling functions for simple things like number of rows fetched, etc.? Any good way to implicitly automate this? I have some ideas, but they require modifying the fundamental PHP language construct. I have attached those thoughts below. Any other ideas, or do we just deal with what we have? Monte