Html Comment Code

[Zack]

Okay. So SHTML isn't complete Perl - just some functions.

[Plasma]

It's more like "html with a few special tags that are handled server-side.".

[toonski84]

*nod to plasma*

[Zack]

Danke for the explanation.
*Googles it to learn more*

[Diroga]

yeah perl's cool. i never hear people talk about it though.

[Zack]

Blasphemy! PHP is cooler!

[Diroga]

perl is a laguage that so happens to be used as scripting. does php make exe's?

[Zack]

Nope, PHP is identical in its purpose to Perl.

[toonski84]

Not really. Here's the story.

Perl is the brainchild of Larry Wall, a newsgroup admin who made Perl in 1987 to make help reports from the text logs. (PERL stands for Practical Extraction and Reports Language). It worked like batch files, and was meant to be a replacement for the weaker unix scripting system "sed". The scripting language became extraordinarily popular among newsgroups, and as the world wide web emerged, developers learned to execute perl scripts on unix servers to do backend work. On a side note, Perl is probably solely responsible for the current popularity of Harry Spencer's regular expression library.

PHP actualy started as a Perl script in 1995 when Rasmus Lerdorf used a perl script to insert some form tags on to his resume page. By request, he released a reprogrammed c version as PHP-tools (personal home page tools). It gained a small following, and Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski completely reworked it in 1997, creating version 3, which is where PHP began to take shape. PHP 4 was even more complete and put it right in the frontline with Perl.

As it stands, both PHP and Perl have positive traits. Perl has a more flexible syntax. It is more powerful (being a general purpose language) and can be converted into C code for compilation. PHP executes faster (sporting modern from 1997-2000 instead of 1995), has many more functions built into its standard library and was designed ground-up for webpages. But the matter of "which is better" is moot because they are so incredibly similar that you can easily port from language to language. They're both great, and it's probably best to learn both, because they both have very strong futures in the world of internet CGI, with the upcoming Perl 6's Parrot machine and PHP 5's Zend engine.

[Zack]

I said, in its purpose.