Q on Primitives

Don't want to take up much of you're time, just wondered if anybody could point me to the reason why some primitives aren't in php. Would find it very very useful to have byte, short, long, float, double and char in php. (primarily byte and char). while I'm here I may as well also ask about further adding type hinting for the existing scalars and array. and finally different method signatures such as: class Whatever { public function __construct(Bar b); public function __construct(Foo f); public function doSomething(Bar b); public function doSomething(Foo f); } Regards!