[fprawn]

There's a lesson here about how sometimes it's okay to fit your data to your code. This was, afterall, in php for years without causing much, if any, problems for end users.

I guess there won't be much agreement here on HN, but this deserves to be recognized as an amusing and clever solution to a problem. Even if the problem is self created.

PHP is great for doing quick and dirty dynamic web pages. So what if it doesn't scale out to a million line program?

[RobAley]

> PHP is great for doing quick and dirty dynamic web pages.

And a lot more besides (subtle plug for http://www.phpbeyondtheweb.com )

> So what if it doesn't scale out to a million line program

I've seen more that one PHP codebase of that size, happily (and maintainably) plodding along.

[awestroke]

Except this was no acceptable solution. Instead of using a better hashing algo than strlen(!), the function names was chosen by length, leading to one of the largest and most criticised flaws of PHP: the inconsistent function naming.