borrowed from C. Borrowed from Perl is the “it should just work” mentality
where ease of use is favored over strictness. As a result, you will find a lot of
“there is more than one way to do it” in PHP. This also means that it is
possible to accomplish tasks in ways that are less than ideal or without
consideration for good security. Many criticize PHP for this, but for simple
tasks or if written carefully, it can be a pretty good language and is easy to
understand and use, especially for quick website creation.
Entering and Exiting PHP Mode
Unlike with PHP’s predecessors, you embed your PHP code inside your
HTML as opposed to the other way around. Before PHP, many websites had
standard HTML pages for most of their content, linking to Perl CGI pages to
do back-end processing when needed. With PHP, all your pages are capable of
processing and containing HTML. This is a huge factor in PHP’s popularity.
Each PHP file is processed by PHP, which looks for code to execute. PHP
considers all the text it finds to be HTML until it finds one of four things:
<?php
<?<%
<script language=“php”>The first option is the preferred method of entering PHP mode because it is
guaranteed to work.
When in PHP mode, you can exit it by using ?> (for <?php and <?); %> (for
<%); or (for