It’s been a feature request for at least eight years, it should never have arisen in the first place, and it should have been a one-line fix even if it had arisen. I don’t mean to knock PHP too badly; it’s quite useful, even if it is rather quirky. I just find it so unfortunate that this silly thing got so out of hand.
It's not "one liner", and couldn't be if you understand how PHP engine works. But it wasn't super-hard to implement, just nobody got to it till now.
It did not "get out of hand" by any measure. Once there was a consensus that this feature is needed by the significant part of PHP community, it was implemented. Could it be done earlier? Maybe, so could a lot of other nice things.
