On 1991-07-25, Jim Blandy introduced the alias `search-forward-regexp'
for `re-search-forward'.  Why?  Lost in the mists of time.  Possibly for
the same reasons people are advancing now - make all the search functions
begin with "search-" for supposed easier searching (of their names).  In
master we currently have 3534 occurences of re-search-forward and 134 of
search-forward-regexp.  Would anybody here argue that Emacs is the better
for these 134 alternatively named function calls?  I'd say it was a
mistake, and there is nothing positive to offset the confusion.

Or `delete-backward-char' and its alias `backward-delete-char'.  We have,
respectively, 5 and 36 uses.  To me, this is just confusion, whatever the
original reason was for these aliases.

I say we shouldn't add to such confusion.