Not really. You may be surprised to learn, as I was, that PHP function hashing mechanism was strlen() in the beginning. So the number of characters was more important than naming consistency.
Yes, I was shocked to learn this about early PHP, that function names were hashed simply by their lengths - so names were chosen to fit a specific length. Pragmatic and fast? Yes. Insane design? Completely.
Edit: I can also imagine this design decision must have had context. Perhaps it was a common technique in low-level programming, as a practical way to save time/space.
Given the amount of functions in early PHP (we are talking PHP/FI 2 max here, even userlevel code hardly had functions back then) even not hashing them at all, but doing a linear search over the function table would have been acceptable. Hashing by length most likely lead to few buckets with more than 3 functions.
That is for function with no C counterparts. htmlspecialchars() exists in no common C library. The reason strlen() is called strlen() (not string_length() or length() or whatever) however is due to C.
