[sgerrand]

A large number of people have previously pointed this out. You're selling the virtues of mod_php, rather than PHP itself.

As other have pointed out in this thread, you can easily configure a web server to behave like that for files in other languages like Perl or Python.

[RandallBrown]

but the difference is that you don't have to configure a web server to act like that for PHP, because (almost) all of them come that way.