OK, all you slow to convert technology anchors, let’s get with the program. Reading between the lines, clearly the people developing PHP are tired of supporting the past. And I agree. There is no good that can come from forcing this language development to support legacy and sometimes just bad ideas unless you want to see MSs C# take over the world. And the PHP frameworks out there still trying to put a smile on faces of 4.x users should take the hint as well.
PHP announced with its most recent sub set release of 5.2.14: This release marks the end of the active support for PHP 5.2. Following this release the PHP 5.2 series will receive no further active bug maintenance. Security fixes for PHP 5.2 might be published on a case by cases basis. All users of PHP 5.2 are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.3.
Use the latest or jump over to the sinking ship known as RoR… peace out.