Objects: Why are they useful?

[eluser]ejangi[/eluser]
I really do wish PHP had a short-hand method of building objects. JavaScript has JSON and Ruby has Hashes. I can't think of the number of times I wish I could just write something like:

Code:

{
    title: 'Hello world',
    description: 'I cannot think of anything right now',
    parent: {
        title: 'It is great to be alive',
        description: 'I love descriptions'
    }
}

And have PHP turn that into objects. *sigh* One day... One day...

[EDIT:] And yes, I know there's YAML and JSON parsers for PHP, but that's not what I want. I want native support (built into the language) for some kind of object shorthand notation. ;-)