I agree with Phil,
It might also be worth noting that Maya treats node names as paths. So when two nodes are in the same hierarchical position, they cannot have the same short name because they share the same parent. So the long name would also fail and the node will no longer be able to be uniquely identified. however when two nodes are in different hierarchical positions , they can share the same short name . i.e "ball", but since they have different parents, Maya identifies these nodes with their long names instead, which include the names of the parents and are unique . i.e "parentA|ball" instead of "ball".
-- http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya
