I think the difference is that PHP's built-ins were originally created as a "toolset" and thus often do more than one thing in fairly specific combinations. I b

I think the difference is that PHP's built-ins were originally created as a "toolset" and thus often do more than one thing in fairly specific combinations. I believe PHP has improved on that but it can still get hairy because of the sheer number of functions living in the global namespace (and horribly outdated community-provided examples in the documentation).