I've been putting some thought into how I might implement some sort of type system that might at least partially help with separating IO and other side-effects. It's probably impossible to guarantee 100% purity, but I was thinking at the very lease I could use reflection to see if any functions called in a piece of code had arguments of or returned values of PHP's 'Resource' type.

What kinds of things make the repl crash for you? I know that most kinds of errors immediately cause it to exit. I should probably get around to adding an error handler to prevent that...

Phake (the build system) is pretty bare-bones right now and since I'm working on more optimization-related stuff I'm probably not working on it in the near future. However, I do want to work on making deployment in Pharen a lot easier and Phake'll help with that.

If you ever want to discuss this stuff more feel free to shoot an email on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pharen) or drop by #pharen on Freenode.