I've long thought one of the biggest problems with PHP, the ugly inconsistent non-namespaced standard library, could be fixed without breaking backwards compati

I've long thought one of the biggest problems with PHP, the ugly inconsistent non-namespaced standard library, could be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. While keeping the current function-names for backwards compatibility, move them all into namespaces while correcting syntactical inconsistencies, poor naming and other problems. In the long-run, deprecate the old function names and move the old PHP4 functions into an PHP.ini switch or importable library.