not passing arguments from HTTP GET?

Hi all, I am running PHP 4.2.2 on Apache 1.3.26 under MacOS X 10.2. My scripts' functionality seems to have gone amok, and while I am not sure this is the fault of php directly, I was hoping someone could help me track down the problem. Basically, if I have a script that I pass arguments to on a get request, the argument seems to be processed (ie, it is found in $_SERVER["argv"][0]), but the actual argument itself has no effect. For example, I have a script that checks for a date variable: if ($date) { print $date; } and when I call it by loading http://www.../date.php?date=2002-09-11 - the script produces nothing, even though the argv(0) is "date=2002-09-11". What's at fault here, any ideas? I am using a binary distro (it's linked from the php site) for OSX, but I've used it in the past and never encountered such a problem. Other PHP functionality seems fine, so I don't think my webserver is in error. The code seems ridiculously simple. Head-scratcher. Thanks for any help, Mark