note crazyinsomniac Perhaps because it isn't really, or only in a limited fashion (with lots of "extensions" disabled, giving only a very lite version of php)? I doubt they're being more clever, it's just that their product/language is lots simpler. I will now quote [http://archive.develooper.com/advocacy@perl.org/msg01553.html] <blockquote> <PRE> Description Perl PHP Namespace management Y N File-scope globals Y N Regular expressions Y Y OOP support Y N(2) Run time code mutability Y Y Extensive lib collection Y Y(4) Closures Y N anonymous subroutines Y N automatic code creation Y N Notes: (2) PHP support for objects is not much different than C++ support for (4) Not quite extensive, but it's getting there - PEAR is only a year or so old. </PRE></blockquote> Since there is no way in perl to prevent a program from modifying `import' among other things, you can't share a perl process among different users. update: Also, perl's regex engine is a "beast", and there exist some race conditions (sorry, I don't got a link handy to a discussion), and PHP just uses PCRE, which is Perl Compatible RE, but not quite Perl re ( and lots of features in the current perl re engine are **experimental**)   <TABLE CELLPADDING=0 CELLSPACING=3 BORDER=0 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"><TR><TD><a href="/index.pl?node=crazyinsomniac&lastnode_id=1072">______crazyinsomniac_____________________________</a> <TT><A HREF="http://www.ozzyosbourne.com/">Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.</A></TT> <A HREF="http://www.divisionbyzero.com/burningman"><TT>perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;" </TT></A></TD></TR></TABLE> 206556 206571