Not to discredit this long post but the media here is now calling kids who text often "hypertexting teens" which really irked me even more... I bet some non-technical news guy thinks he is awesome for coming up with that one. On Nov 11, 2010, at 9:54 AM, "Daniel P. Brown" <daniel.brown@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 08:51, Robert Cummings <robert@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Yeah, that and some Gateway with a Common Interface. > > My point was that there is now and never was any such PHP project > known as pre-hypertext preprocessor. It originated as Personal Home > Page Tools (PHP Tools) and Forms Interpreter (FI) --- the former was a > series of C binaries, the latter was a CGI wrapper that actually > preprocessed straight HTML by hopping in and out of <!--HTML > Comments--> using SSI. For a short while, if memory serves me > correctly, a version of the package was also named Personal Home Page > Construction Kit. Eventually the packages merged into PHP/FI, and a > rewrite was done sometime during 1997, I believe, which became PHP/FI > 2.0. I first started using it back in 1996 for quick and simple tasks > where Perl would be a bit overkill. > > The part I can't remember clearly is whether PHP/FI2 was done in > 1996 or 1997, though, because I do remember it was the fall of 1997 > when PHP3 came out, and it blew me away. It sucked a bit having to > now learn how to use the new PHP to build a page, but damned if it > wasn't a trillion times easier to work with than Perl, right from the > get-go. I remember being excited by the fact that I could rewrite a > simple flat-file database Perl program I originally wrote in about > three days in under two hours with PHP. From that point on, I was > hooked on it, despite its quirky recursive-acronym name --- PHP: > Hypertext Preprocessor. > > So when I asked if "pre-hypertext preprocessor" meant Perl, it > could well have been Python, C/C++ on SSI, Tcl/Tk, or anything.... > anything, that is, that came "pre-" PHP. > > That said, I have seen references to PHP being named > "Pre-Hypertext Preprocessor," but that would be incorrect anyway. The > HTML (HyperText Markup Language) could be preprocessed, so that much > is fine.... but "pre-hypertext" would be truly amusing. Any request > to a web page is presently made via HTTP (HyperText Transfer > Protocol), and any text displayed on any electronic device with > embedded references (also known as hyperlinks). > > So any language that could pre-process pre-hypertext would either > have the unique ability to foresee the future, the mundane ability to > "pre-process" plain text (or request headers or anything prior to the > data being classified as hypertext), or the disconcerting ability to > modify reality as we know it. And why bother to do that when you > could just <%= go elsewhere. %>? ;-P > > > > (It's felt like Friday all day.) > > -- > </Daniel P. Brown> > Dedicated Servers, Cloud and Cloud Hybrid Solutions, VPS, Hosting > (866-) 725-4321 > http://www.parasane.net/ > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
