I posted this request long ago and will trying it again. After reading
that the last summery of the PEAR meeting (2003-05-10 in Amsterdam) I
noticed that the PHPDocumentor is now the official tool to generate the API
documentation. 

*But* PHPDocumentor, like many other tools that need to parse the PHP
code, all suffer from the same problem: Direct support from the
PHP-language itself.
All of these tools must 'simulate' the real PHP parser and are dammed to fail (at least on the next major PHP release). 

If the PHP lib would offer parsing support (see below) it would open a world of PHP tools.

My basic idea is to have access to the PHP parsing results (type, line
number, ...).

It would be neet to hace a vituell PHP parser. Passing a file to the
virtuell PHP-parser object should result in structure that can be
requested by PHP itself. E.g. Arrays that deliver name, type and line
number of the containing classes, class-methods, class-vars and other
attributes.
Similar to
  array get_class_methods ( mixed class_name)
  array get_class_var ( mixed class_name)

Regards Sam