RE: [PHP] What "PHP" Stands For....

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:rasmus@php.net] Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 8:50 AM To: Toby Butzon Cc: php-general@lists.php.net; 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 -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net