It would be very nice to have a non-CGI version of PHP for using as a stand-alone command line interpreter.  Perhaps a separate build option for this could be added, such as "--with-standalone", although this could be done entirely through configuration options.  However, not being dependent on a configuration file at all would be beneficial.

- Not require the "-q" quiet option to disable outputting CGI headers.

- Not require start/end tags.  It is usually not useful in a scripting language to pass text directly through to the output stream.

- Have the standard file handles already open and available, in the same manner as $argc and $argv: $stdin, $stdout and $stderr.