I'm growing to like the idea myself. It may create new opportunities for bad practices, but I don't think it's the concern of internals to police how people may or may not use a feature. There are also I think a few things that would need to be addressed before this would be ready for the real world. For example:
1) As hinted at previously, the "use" statement. Doing this per-method as suggested would be less ambiguous than applying to the whole class - and would also prevent pollution. 2) Transparency between an anonymous class and the class in which it is defined (if any). One thing I found very restrictive about closures back in 5.3 was the lack of $this support. I can imagine that missing functionality being similarly restrictive for these new anonymous classes. Obviously $this itself will be reserved for use by the anonymous class, which means there would need to be an alternative. Passing in a variable is one thing, but as it stands the anon class would then only have public access. Something like $class with similar behaviour to $this could be an option. In Java I believe anonymous classes have the same scope as the method in which they're defined. Would something like this or similar be feasible and permissible in PHP?
