DevX: The Object-Oriented Evolution of PHP

“Few people know this, but when PHP as we know it today was
being molded, back in the summer of 1997, there were no plans for
it to have any object-oriented capabilities. Andi Gutmans and I
were working to create a powerful, robust and efficient Web
language loosely based on the PHP/FI 2.0 and C syntax. As a matter
of fact, we got pretty far without having any notion of classes or
objects—it was to be a purely structured language. However,
on August 27th of that year, PHP’s object capabilities changed.

“When classes were introduced to the code base of what was to
become PHP 3.0, they were added as syntactic sugar for accessing
collections. PHP already had the notion of associative array
collections, and the new classes were nothing but a neat new way of
accessing them. However, as time has proven, this new syntax proved
to have a much more far-reaching effect on PHP than was originally
intended…”

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