[laumars]

I'm not asking for PHP to break it's compatibility over night, but it's fairly reasonable for a language to depreciate a function over several major releases which might span a few years.

ie version 5.6 will raise a warning when some_function is called, saying that some_function will be depreciated in future versions of PHP. So you have both the old and new functions running in parallel for a while. Then a couple of major versions later, you drop support for the older function name.

As I said before, PHP has already been doing just this for some stuff for a while now, so it's not an alien concept to PHP developers.