Description:
------------
A very helpful and nice feature for PHP would be to overload builtin functions. As PHP5 now features the functions echo and  print are calling the method __toString if it exists in a class, that feature is still lacking in many other functions where they may be useful (like sprintf, printf, just to name a few).

To prevent that PHP developers have to do alot of work and to provide a general interface, something like the following pseudo code demonstrates overloading builtin functions:

<?php

function myOwnEcho ()
{
  $ts = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");

  print ($ts . " ");

  $num_args = func_num_args();

  for ($i=0; $i < $num_args; $i++)
  {
    print (func_get_arg($i));
  }
}

overload_function("echo", "myOwnEcho");

echo "foo";

?>

Results in:

2004-04-21 15:09:01 foo


I know that echo is a language construct and not a function, it's just been used because most PHP developers use echo for output.