[jhgb]

It seemed kind of obvious to me even at that time that it was taken from Perl. I just didn't get why. PHP could have lifted IMPLEMENTATION DIVISION from COBOL, but likewise, there would have been no point either (fortunately it didn't do that!).

[fetbaffe]

Early web was written in Perl, I guess it was the classic approach of lets borrow what is already successful and in end PHP won over Perl so it worked too. Bill Gates would have been proud.