[Firehed]

What lack of separation? Don't take this the wrong way, but have you ever actually tried to use PHP in a non-web context? Running "./foo.php" is just as easy as "./foo.py", "./foo.rb", etc. All of these complains seem to come from people that have never even tried to do this kind of stuff. It's damn easy.

If you echo HTML, you get HTML. If you echo binary data, you get binary data. JSON, XML (including SOAP bodies), text, nothing at all, file i/o, direct socket connections, exit codes - all are supported equally well. The only thing vaguely related is the HTTP headers that you get for free if you're running it behind a fastcgi module (apache's mod_php, nginx/php-fpm, etc).