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Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2013 20:24:06 -0500
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To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>, internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Flexible function naming
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

On 12/16/2013 07:30 PM, Rowan Collins wrote:

> The core functions which follow neither rule include C-style
> abbreviations like "strptime" which couldn't be automatically swapped to
> either format, and complete anomalies like "nl2br". If you named those
> functions as part of a consistent style, you would probably also follow
> stronger naming conventions than Rasmus did when he named
> "htmlspecialchars".

Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a
very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the
function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash
distribution of function names across the various function name lengths
names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length
bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own
personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember
the few function names.

-Rasmus