Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 11:55 AM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet at bsb.me.uk> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>> it binds your URLs to
>> the concrete file system. That may not seem like too much of a
>> problem, but it's a pretty big limitation; you can't have URLs like
>> "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo" without some help from the web
>> server, eg Apache's mod_rewrite.
>
> I don't follow this.  Your "can't" and "big limitation" suggests
> something inevitable, but I don't see it as an intrinsic problem with
> the language.  I'm sure PHP is not as flexible as the frameworks you
> mention, but you are not tied to URLs mapping to files.  Maybe you meant
> that this is what often happens, or what most people do, with PHP.

How would you, with PHP itself, handle database-provided URLs? The
only way I've ever seen it done is at an external level - such as
mod_rewrite - which means that someone else, *not* the PHP script, is
managing your URLs. They're pushed to some external config file
somewhere. That's okay for just one URL pattern, but it doesn't scale
well, which is why (for example) Wikipedia's editing pages are
"/w/index.php?...." instead of, say, "/wiki/Foo/edit" or
"/wiki/edit/Foo".

Unless you know something I don't?

ChrisA