Not to mention, if they namespaced all math functions it&#x27;d break backward compatibility badly. Given that no core PHP functions are namespaced, I don&#x27;t see why they <i>should</i> start now.<p>Also, with the functions in the global namespace you can implement a namespaced copy that takes precedence within the namespace and its children. It can easily confuse people, but I&#x27;ve seen it used to force people away from string functions to their multibyte equivalents (it threw exceptions).