It's impossible for a collection of letters to be creative but for that collection of letters when represented numerically to be no longer creative. If I make up some BS for how there's a correspondence between these symbols and other symbols (1=alpha, 2=bravo, ...; or 1=sandwich, 2=wellington, ...) - then 1383() is just sandwichBiscuitAppleBiscuit(). Then it's clear the creative aspects of the program, API, or whatever, don't lie in the specific choice of tokens.
Would a judge agree that providing a dictionary/key that says an arbitrary name for each number (easy to do programmatically) makes a program creative that otherwise wouldn't be. It's clearly ridiculous. Not least because it would mean that duplicating a work that was compressed, or represented in binary, would then no longer be a tort, because apparently numerical representation would rule out a work from being creative.
The real key point is in the second half, though. Arguing over whether or not a particular micro-decision is "creative" is the entirely wrong track to be taking when we're discussing something that is functional, that performs some real task in a way that a movie or song simply does not. Why would we expect standards based on "creativity" to apply to that in any sensible way?