Deprecating it is also a lot of effort for very little improvement. People would be forced to fix all their constructors calls just to skip the parameter. Personally I would be very annoyed by such a pointless change.
Plus those that actually do use the code will be forced eventually to reimplement the code thing themselves, they'll end up having a base class for this, and other people will do the same just to maintain compatibility with older PHPs, and then even more people will do the same, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria. I think this is absolutely unnecessary, as you can simply not using "getCode()" if you don't need it, and because adding a "0" in the parent::__construct(..., 0, ...) is not too much work. With this change we keep old code covered, *and* we enable people to use the field in more ways if they desire to. \o
