[Nextgrid]

The real reason for PHP's bad function names is that early in the language's history, the hash function used to map function names to their actual code was the length of the string, so you couldn't have two function with a name of the same length, thus the intentionally inconsistent naming convention.

[JZN666]

But this gives very short set of possible function names (up to 20 characters length (?), more is not adequate for development). And even with this parse_str could be named something like "url_parse_query_params_from_str(str)".