Rasmus, you are genius!
This is one of the coolests postings of yours I ever read in here.
I will now know how to talk about that guy who made it and what PHP stands
for.
I, personally, always knew it but never could explain myself:
The replies from my clients on my "well, then maybe we should design it in
PHP" usually are:
"PHP"?
What is "PHP"?
What do you mean by "PHP" ?
is that... ?
oh... really?
but "Hypertext Preprocessor" is "HPP" ... hmm makes no sense...
oh...
"PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"? nor even that makes sense enough... that
would be "PHPHPP" ... hmm...
.......and so on;...and so on;......and so on............
BUT Now I will have something to print out and to bring in my bag with me
all the time awaiting for these naive interrogations.
:-))
You are my saver, Rasmus!
Cheers,
Maxim Maletsky
-----Original Message-----
From: Rasmus Lerdorf [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 8:50 AM
To: Toby Butzon
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Brian White
Subject: Re: [PHP] What "PHP" Stands For....
> That's the truth. PHP started out as a set of "Personal Home Page tools"
> (1st version), then PHP/FI (PHP + form interpretter [or something similar
-
> I'm not sure 'form interpretter' is completely correct, but that was
> basically the functionality of the FI portion])... anyway, then sometime
> during PHP3/4 they opted to change it to Hypertext Preprocessor... it
> wasn't really just "personal home page tools" anymore ;)
>
> Anyway, I only know what I read - I got to the scene to late to actually
> know this stuff first hand... hope this helps... and if someone who really
> was on the scene back then cares to comment/correct me, please do ;)
I sort of do. ;)
The first thing I put out was a collection of cgi scripts collectively
known as the Personal Home Page Tools. These were tools I was using on my
own home page to track hits on my resume, do custom logging to mSQL and
other things.
I had another tool that wasn't really part of the package that I used to
process form data. Because I am a lazy sod, I kept the filename short.
It was just "fi" in my cgi-bin directory. I sat down and completely
rewrote the parser behind the PHP Tools and at that point it became very
obvious that the little FI tool needed to be an integral part of the
package. That's where the whole concept of bringing form variables
directly in and making them available to all the different tools came
from. When talking to people I described it as PHP/FI a couple of times
as a bit of a joke (because it looked like TCP/IP) and it just stuck. I
couldn't think of a better name and people were starting to use it, so I
just left it.
When the development team grew and the next rewrite hit (PHP 3) it was
decided to drop the rather akward /FI part and just make it PHP, but since
even at this time it had grown to be significantly more than a set of
tools for personal home pages, that meaning was also dropped. A name vote
ensued and all the proposed names sucked, so this PHP: Hypertext
Preprocessor name was deemed to suck the least. So that's where we are.
As far as I am concerned PHP is just PHP. It doesn't stand for anything.
-Rasmus
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