Joshua Thompson, inspired by another blog post on a use for the PHP tokenizer, has started off on a new project to expand on one of the examples - a preprocessor.

It makes a lot of sense for the library developer. They could easily create multiple versions of their code depending on PHP version, target platform, backend database, etc. So I started working on my own implementation of a preprocessor with the goal of making it easy to add plugins for additional functionality. It was during the construction of the core of the preprocessor, that it hit me: why can't we implement new language features in the preprocessor.

As a result, he's created his first version of PPP - PPP PHP PreProcessor (yes, recursive). It's a starting point that has a plugin for traits handling and a soon to come plugin to reduce the need for namespaces.

Time for a little nostalgia today in this new post from Philip Olson looking back at a brief history of the PHP acronym - where it came from and how it evolved to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".

While reminiscing what PHP was like back in the early early years, I stumbled upon a little historical nugget from the old website. Do you know what the acronym PHP stands for? Many of us do, or think we do. [...] But how was the definition chosen? For fun, here's a look back at the official vote that determined this new meaning way back in 1998. It might be worth mentioning that Rasmus, the father of PHP, did not vote for the eventual winner.

He also includes a few "notable quotes that could be taken out of context" from Rasmus Lerdorf concerning his opinions on the matter of the acronym's meaning as well as some other brief notes on the history of PHP and its name change.

Time for a little nostalgia today in this new post from Philip Olson looking back at a brief history of the PHP acronym - where it came from and how it evolved to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".

While reminiscing what PHP was like back in the early early years, I stumbled upon a little historical nugget from the old website. Do you know what the acronym PHP stands for? Many of us do, or think we do. [...] But how was the definition chosen? For fun, here's a look back at the official vote that determined this new meaning way back in 1998. It might be worth mentioning that Rasmus, the father of PHP, did not vote for the eventual winner.

He also includes a few "notable quotes that could be taken out of context" from Rasmus Lerdorf concerning his opinions on the matter of the acronym's meaning as well as some other brief notes on the history of PHP and its name change.

On his blog today, Jonnay looks at the Google "Summer of Code" (or as he calls it, their "Summer of Yawn"), specifically at one project, the PHP Macro Preprocessor.

This (as described) sounds exactly like a rewrite of the C preprocessor, which one can work with fairly easily in a PHP environment. To see this duplication of effort on something so boring and useless makes me question just how much PHP is its own language, versus a Frankensteins monster of language clones; see PHP 5's object system for a perfect example.

He comments that maybe the developer should have come up with a different way to do it instead of making what appears to be a sibling of the current processor. He also suggests that PHP developers step up and create methods for the current compiler to make using things like design patterns much simpler than they currently are.

On his blog today, Jonnay looks at the Google "Summer of Code" (or as he calls it, their "Summer of Yawn"), specifically at one project, the PHP Macro Preprocessor.

This (as described) sounds exactly like a rewrite of the C preprocessor, which one can work with fairly easily in a PHP environment. To see this duplication of effort on something so boring and useless makes me question just how much PHP is its own language, versus a Frankensteins monster of language clones; see PHP 5's object system for a perfect example.

He comments that maybe the developer should have come up with a different way to do it instead of making what appears to be a sibling of the current processor. He also suggests that PHP developers step up and create methods for the current compiler to make using things like design patterns much simpler than they currently are.