Here are patches for PHP4 (currently PHP 4.4.9) and PHP 5.3.3
trying to simplify common tasks.

Maintained (used in our production environment, currently PHP5):
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- function_call_named_parameters.patch
  Adds syntactic sugar to function calls by allowing dangling commas
  in the parameter list (to allow adding lines by copy and pasting
  without having to readjust commas for the last line) and passing
  associative arrays without array().
  This sort of emulates named parameters in a more easily readable way.
  Example:
    table('id' => "navigation", 'class' => "fullwidth",
      tr(
        td("foo"),
        td(
          input('type' => "text", 'name' => "q"),
          input('type' => "submit", 'value' => "search"),
        ),
      ),
    );
  is the same as
    table(array('id' => "navigation", 'class' => "fullwidth"),
      tr(
        td("foo"),
        td(
          input(array('type' => "text", 'name' => "q")),
          input(array('type' => "submit", 'value' => "search"))
        )
      )
    );

    or
      $user_db->select('firstname' => "foo", 'lastname' => "bar");
    is the same as
      $user_db->select(array('firstname' => "foo", 'lastname' => "bar"));