I can understand requiring constants for static initialization.  But can the parser be modified to support operators on constants for static initializations?  This is especially true for long strings which I can't even break at the end of line for readability.  (I almost submitted this as a bug :)

Examples:
            $v = 1 + 2;   // Okay
     static $s = 1 + 2;   // Fails parse

            $v = "this long "
                 ."string";  // Okay
     static $s = "this long "
                 ."string";  // Fails parse

Since only constants are involved the parser could collapse the expression without difficulty.  This makes the code much more readable (again thinking of very long strings).  In my case I'm building an array of error messages and don't want the array build to occur everytime the function is called, hence I made it static.