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

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.

     

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**)

 

______crazyinsomniac_____________________________ Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

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