This section holds the most general questions about PHP: what it
is and what it does. - What is PHP? 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. - What does PHP stand for? 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. For more information, the curious
can visit » Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing or the »
Wikipedia entry on recursive acronyms. - What is the relation
between the versions? 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 5 is the current generation of PHP,
which uses the » Zend engine 2 which, among other things, offers
many additional OOP features. - Can