@wldlyinaccurate - I never said anything about backwards-compatibility, its just a matter of compatibility between versions backward or not.

>>You used features which were introduced in 5.4, and expected them to work in 5.3. Yes, that can happen sometimes, especially when you are working between dev and production environments. But basic things like improvising array De-referencing syntax should not be done this late in time, don't you agree?

Other languages do have innovations but they are in advanced things - C# improvisations were in introducing LINQ library and the parallel task library. Python has a standard way of doing basic things like array De-referencing since the 90s!. Then why is PHP changing such basic language constructs today? 5.3 was released in 2009. Language constructs ought to have been standardized by then.