There is an ongoing discussion about the nature of PHP that is taking place in the shoutbox, and I think it should be moved into a topic in its own right.

People seem to be divided into 3 camps.

Some people are saying things like:
"but php is a programming language..."
"it is a full-fledged programming language; it's actually quite similar to c++, and also offers classes, which I consider a powerful feature"

Then again others are saying:
"by official definition I would imagine, I don't like thinking of it as one"
"someone i know is making a php bnc, but in all other cases, Php is scripting to me"

The third group of people chime in with:
"well, sure it's a programming language, but it's still a scripting language. Traditional programming languages allow stand-alone applications, which PHP doesn't yet"

I would like to start this formal discussion with an example of how you can run a PHP piece of code from the command line, outside of the context of a web rendering engine.

When you download and decompress PHP, you end up with a directory that looks like this:

Please note the existence of the executable php.exe.
I created a little PHP piece of code in a file called standalone.php:

Let's imagine for a moment that Apache isn't installed on my PC and let's try to execute that PHP piece of code:

There is a way to suppress the extra fluff at the beginning of the output, by specifying the "-q" (for quiet) flag:


Edit: I just realized now, after looking over my posting again, that putting stuff inside the console tag interprets the backslash as an escape character, so wherever you see C:ApacheApachephp - it was originally

This post has been edited by pyost: Aug 15 2007, 10:33 AM

I already knew it had the ability to make standalone software when I said I still don't think of it as a true coding language. The vast majority of people use php solely for scripting and will never create a stand alone php application and in the context that the discussion started I was making a reference to someone who WOULD only be using it for scripting as he had just discovered it and was using it in the backend of his website.

I'm sure others have opinions, but personally I feel it's a mix but still is rarely if ever used for stand alone apps. It shines as script.

I think it is a mix of both, the majority of people use it for web development but you can also create stand alone applications, and remember that with the use of the GTK you can also create graphical applications.

Best regards,

I think its very true!

And it thinks me of installing it right now!

You didn't create a standalone application, you've created a script that is interpreted by another program (php). Thus PHP is a scripting language.
As long as you don't complile prior to running your application, you can say that a language is a scripting language.

Well I think I am going to disagree with your statement. You are narrowing down the criteria too much.

There are two categorizations we are talking about:
1) programming language versus scripting language
2) compiled versus interpreted

In my opinion, those are independent or ... (trying to find a better word to describe it) orthogonal criteria (yes it sounds more like geometry, I know).

You can have:
- compiled programming languages
- interpreted programming languages
- interpreted scripting languages

I'm trying to think of a compiled scripting language, but none comes to mind.

dserban makes quite a valid point. Prolog, for example, springs to my mind. It is in fact a full featured logic based programming language but it is fully interpreted if I'm not mistaken. I know all the work I've done with it I used it as a live interpreter and never even came across a way to make a pre-compiled application type scenario.

I still say php is barely a programming language though haha, people use it for scripting 99% of the time so to me it'll always be a scripting language that has the ability to be used for more

The main difference between a programming language and a scripting language is that the former may be compiled into binary code and executed while the latter needs to be interpreted each time. I guess that makes, PHP a scripting language, no matter how powerful or object oriented it is.


Source: Wikipedia

Ok, i think it is true in a certain way but i don't completely agree with you because there exists compilers for PHP, the one i remember in this moment is the Roadsend PHP Compiler, this is what it says on its main page:


For more information visit the Roadsend PHP Compiler website.

Best regards,

its a hypertext processor doncha know