The parent comment is referring to https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 (found via https://news.ycombinator

The parent comment is referring to https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691 (found via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6919216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6919216). Quoting from that link: 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.