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What's the meaning of PHP ?
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 1:08 am
by rax369
I have always wanted to ask this, I know, it's something stupid to ask this in a forum like this, but since I dont know the answer

and I'm begining to learn PHP... at least I should know what's the meaning of the programming language I'm learning right
Thx

what is the meaning of php, I mean life
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 2:10 am
by phpScott
I believe it stands for

pre hypertext processing
don't quote me but that seems to ring a bell.
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 4:08 am
by f1nutter
PHP stands for 'PHP Hypertext Preprocessor'. It's a recursive definition.
Recursive means that the meaning is derived from a previous iteration.
So the PHP in the above definition also means 'PHP Hypertext Preprocessor', which becomes 'PHP Hypertext Preprocessor Hypertext Preprocessor and so on. A sort of geeky joke!
Moo
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 7:16 am
by James Pelow
It All Began...
... some time in 1994 when Rasmus Lerdorf put together a bunch of Perl scripts to track down who was looking at his resume. Little by little, people started to get interested in the scripts, and they were later released as a package "Personal Home Page" tools (the first meaning of PHP). In view of the interest, he wrote a scripting engine and incorporated another tool to parse input from HTML forms: FI, Form Interpreter, thus creating what was called variously PHP/FI or PHP2. This was done around mid 1995.
Soon, people started to use these tools to do more complicated things, and the development changed from just one person, to a group of core developers in charge of the project and its organization. This was the beginning of PHP3. This group of developers (Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans, Zeev Suraski, Stig Bakken, Shane Caraveo, andjim Winstead), improved and extended the scripting engine and added a simple API that allows other programmers the liberty to add more functionality to the language by writing modules for it. The language's syntax was also refined, with constructs that will be familiar for people coming from object oriented or procedural languages. If you know C, C++ or java, or have done even some shell/awk scripting, or written a Pascal or VBasic program, learning the basic PHP constructs would be a breeze.
PHP now stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor", as said before.
-James
To rax369
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 8:20 am
by Bill H
I don't think your question was stupid at all.
In fact I'm glad you were clever enough to ask it.
I found the answers very interesting.
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 9:02 am
by volka
those self refering definitions are quite common in the unix world, like GNU - GNU's not unix or pine - pine is nearly elm and so on
some right
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 1:40 pm
by phpScott
Well at least I got some of it right.
Thanks for the history lesson James.
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 2:45 pm
by Takuma
I think PHP is just another scripting language which is very useful to a lot of developers. It has good points and bad points (Ask ASP developers they'll porbably say something about PHP...). And don't forget it's another language which comes from C.
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2002 11:59 pm
by volka
it's written in C but the syntax is a mixture of C, much of perl and even visual basic programmer will find parts they are used to.
Posted: Sun Oct 27, 2002 1:52 am
by Takuma
I mean was C that good? I'm too young to know that kinda stuff but looks like it was revolutional. Nowdays all the languages come from C.
Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 6:56 am
by DeGauss
C is the best.
Although CPlusPlus is better.
I think i saw this quote on this forum... But i'm not sure
"Using C and screwing up is like shooting yourself in the leg... Using C and screwing up is like blowing your entire leg off".
It's all about power.
And malloc.
Ahoo
Posted: Mon Oct 28, 2002 11:37 pm
by sam
"Using C and screwing up is like shooting yourself in the leg... Using C and screwing up is like blowing your entire leg off".
That just doesn't make sence!
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 1:45 am
by volka
Once a again the plus-eating board error
...Using Cplusplus and screwing up is like blowing your entire leg off
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 7:19 pm
by rax369
yea

thx a lot
James Pelow for the history lesson!
I would never imaginate, that PHP begun like that, very very interesting.
thx man

Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 10:12 pm
by sam
volka wrote:Once a again the plus-eating board error
...Using Cplusplus and screwing up is like blowing your entire leg off
Thanks that makes a bit more sence...
(and Cpp owns)