Regarding new functionality.

Hello, First of all sorry if I've sent this email to the wrong address, but reading the contact page in PHP.net I couldn't figure out where the best place for such a query would be. Okay. well here it goes. I've been writing software in PHP since my high school freshman years - now in the second year of college I'm even earning a fair living writing PHP code. I come from a background of C++ and Java, as such I miss the entire OOP paradigm in PHP. Sure, one could argue that PHP support OOP to some level . and that it does very well, but to a very restricted level. To that extends there doesn't seem to be any way of overloading the '[ ]', '+', '-', etc. operators; another minus for PHPs OOP approach is the use of 'utility functions' for database connectivity, file operations, etc. when all this functionality could be grouped in classes. Sure, one could write ones classes as wrappers for these utility functions. But lets assume one would want to extend the functionality of Hash Maps or Arrays to some extent . one could not override the '[ ]' operator (for example). Yes , for such a class, one could provide a 'public 0function index( $index ) { return $this->a[$index]; }' but that makes for some quirky code when one has to explicitly call member functions just to call an index from a hash/array. Another problem I seem to have, relating to the OOP approach in PHP, is with Expat XML parsing. If I have an object that at some point (in a member function) should parse an xml file . I can't, for the life of me, seem to register callbacks found within that object. I must provide functions that are exterior to that object, or else xml_parse won't be able to call them. That again makes for terribly quirky code. Clear as mud? Let me know. Will PHP ever grow out of this 'young' oop approach? Or am I missing something regarding the functionality I've mentioned? Sincerely, Silviu Lucian PS: please excuse my english