This section holds the most general questions about PHP:
what it is and what it does.
From the preface of the
manual:
PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. Much
of its syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a
couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in. The
goal of the language is to allow web developers to
write dynamically generated pages quickly.
A nice introduction to PHP by Stig S犚her Bakken
can be found
here on the Zend website. Also, much of the PHP
Conference Material is freely available.
PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. This
confuses many people because the first word of the
acronym is the acronym. This type of acronym is called
a recursive acronym. The curious can visit Free On-Line
Dictionary of Computing for more information on
recursive acronyms.
PHP/FI 2.0 is an early and no longer supported
version of PHP. PHP 3 is the successor to PHP/FI 2.0
and is a lot nicer. PHP 4 is the current generation of
PHP, which uses the Zend engine under the hood. PHP 5
uses Zend engine 2 which, among other
things, offers many additional OOP features. PHP 5 is
experimental.
Yes. See the INSTALL file
that is included in the PHP 4 source distribution.
Also, read the related appendix.
There are a couple of articles written on this
by the authors of PHP 4. Here's a list of some of the
more important new features:
You should go to the PHP Bug Database and make sure
the bug isn't a known bug. If you don't see it in the
database, use the reporting form to report the bug. It
is important to use the bug database instead of just
sending an email to one of the mailing lists because
the bug will have a tracking number assigned and it
will then be possible for you to go back later and
check on the status of the bug. The bug database can be
found at
http://bugs.php.net/.