I think it should be fixed. This is a twist of human mind.

Backward compatibility is not really a problem. Without fixing it, this kind of broken interpretation will go die sooner or later. Instead of letting it die, why not just fix it and revive it. I don't expect many people or many application actually use this feature, the compatibility problem is minimum.

On the other hand, this kind of unnatural stuff really hurts application's maintainability, and programmer should be responsible for assessing it before using it.