I wouldn't say it's a good name, but I think the advantage of documenting an existing name outweighs that. We can start (or continue) using generate_tokens() right away, whereas a new name presumably wouldn't be available until Python 3.8 comes out. And we usually don't require a new Python version until a couple of years after it is released.

If we want to add better names or clearer APIs on top of this, great. But I don't want that discussion to hold up the simple step of committing to keep the existing API.