I can foresee them making a turn on this decision and continuing to support XP until developers actually stop using XP anymore. XP isn't going away anytime soon

I can foresee them making a turn on this decision and continuing to support XP until developers actually stop using XP anymore. XP isn't going away anytime soon. It was nice to see short tags "<?" coming back in 5.4. Before that, they used to say, don't use short tags, it's dangerous, breaks things. But users resisted it, and every ISP kept it open. And now from PHP 5.4 short tag is ON, regardless of whether one setts it On or Off in php.ini.