What's the meaning of PHP ?

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rax369
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What's the meaning of PHP ?

Post 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 :oops: 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 :D
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phpScott
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what is the meaning of php, I mean life

Post by phpScott »

I believe it stands for
:arrow: pre hypertext processing

don't quote me but that seems to ring a bell.
f1nutter
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Post 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!
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James Pelow
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Post 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
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Bill H
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To rax369

Post 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.
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volka
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Post 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
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phpScott
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some right

Post by phpScott »

Well at least I got some of it right.:D
Thanks for the history lesson James.
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Takuma
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Post 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.
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volka
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Post 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.
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Takuma
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Post 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.
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Post 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.
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sam
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Post 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!
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volka
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Post by volka »

Once a again the plus-eating board error
...Using Cplusplus and screwing up is like blowing your entire leg off
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rax369
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Post 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 :D
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sam
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Post 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)
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