[616c]

> For me, that's not a feature, it's an oddity that I have to work around.

Well, I would venture a guess that you should have looked up the language's name and its meaning, then the entire focus of PHP might not come as much of a surprise.

[rbanffy]

"Personal Home Page"?

[gnerd]

> Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive acronym PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php#History

[616c]

Yes, to get back to my point, it is basically a templating language for HTML, hence the hypertext. I think the name made it clear being ambitious with it outside of HTML was going to be difficult, unless you like the challenge of making cars into airplanes, and submarines in to hang-gliders.