The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by author Thomas Punt that walks you through the execution of PHP - a "behind the scenes" look at how the PHP processing engine does its magic.

Inspired by a recent article on how Ruby code executes, this article covers the execution process for PHP code. [...] There’s a lot going on under the hood when we execute a piece of PHP code.

He then walks you through the four main steps the engine goes through to turn your PHP code into results: lexing, parsing, compilation and interpretation. For each stage in the process there's a brief description of what piece(s) of the language are doing the work and some examples of how to see the results in more user-land PHP code (like with the AST parser).