title: Why does PHPUnit insist on doing things the OO way?
body: <p>At the risk of being flamed... what advantage does enforcing calls to methods rather than functions have in a context where the context is implicit.</p>
  
  <p>Considering that PHP's syntax is so ugly for calling methods why would PHPUnit's creators have enforced its usage?</p>
  
  <p>If the framework had set a global "currentTestCase" object and then transparently associated failed asserts with that object we could be writing:</p>
  
  <pre><code>assertEquals("blah", $text);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>as opposed to the equivalent, but verbose:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$this-&gt;assertEquals("blah", $text);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What exactly do we get by using OO in this context.</p>
  
  <p>Please enlighten me.</p>