I have cooked a patch that adds a function named debug_get_object_handle()
which returns the handle id of an object. Having a function like this makes
devs' live easier - no need to parse the output of var_dump().
The patch is available here:
http://hristov.com/andrey/projects/php_stuff/patches/debug_get_object_handle.patch
If there are no objections I would like to commit it to 5_0 (this don't break
anything) and 5_1.
As simple as it is, I wouldn't care about it getting committed, but in the interrest of staying out of stable branches, you could always use runkit_object_id().