In the previous exercise, we explored how PHP can be sent from the back-end to the front-end where it is received as HTML to be displayed by a browser.
PHP is flexible and can also be executed from the terminal. We can use PHP as a general purpose programming language to write programs that give simple instructions to the computer without involving HTML or the web. When this is done, the output of the program is logged to the terminal. This is useful when testing functionality or for writing simple local programs.
When writing a PHP script file, we still need to denote that we are beginning our PHP code using <?php, but the closing tag is no longer required. It is typically left out by convention.