Yea, it would be awesome, but it is kind of a difficult issue, since how would it work in a language that is expected to be flexible due to its loosely-typed nature?
Would it simply type detect, type cast, or what?

I mean, I think it should just do a "is_integer()"-like type check, but it could do a number of things, technically. If you're curious, check out the RFC for it:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/typechecking