include file in php vs. include file in asp

[searain]

In ASP

The following script will not work because ASP executes the #include directive before it assigns a value to the variable:

<%
fname="header.inc"
%>
<!--#include file="<%=fname%>"-->

But in PHP, we can assign the file name and include it later on.

My questions is

1) What is the langugage background difference of how php works vs. how asp works with the include file here? why php works and asp not works?

2) Include file cannot be assigned in the process in ASP is a big disadvantage of ASP, did they fixed it yet? If not, ASP programmer has some other ways to get around it?

I think this quesion comparing asp vs. php may get better answers from php programmers who know asp programming here. (An ASP programmer may switch to php but I cannot see why php programmers switch to ASP if not for the job switch reasons.🙂)

Thanks!

[AstroTeg]

Definetely because of job reasons...

As you noticed in ASP, you can't include files in the same as you do in PHP.

The difference: PHP does it via functions. ASP does it by SSI (server side includes - you might remember those, they worked great if you needed to use CGI or some other tricks without being able to use scripting languages like PHP). Make sense?

The part that really sucks (in my opinion) is the order of operations for ASP:

You request an ASP page and the server looks up ASP page and:

1. Processes SSI (it takes all your includes and tosses them together to make 1 "file")
2. Process ASP

Then the page output makes it to the browser. The sucky part is ASP doesn't have a clean built in way of including files. In theory, you could try building your own by using eval methods. But I haven't tried this. The other problem with using SSI for this approach is you can't dynamically load include files like libraries and use them only when you need them. Instead, ASP will end up loading every single file first, and then process ALL the ASP it found (I'm pretty sure on this - don't quote me though, its been a while). PHP can do this as well, I believe, using SSI. Although its a lot easier to just use include() which you can then insert into a control structure and have PHP "include" the file on demand.

I don't know if you're working with just ASP or if you're working with ASP.NET. I haven't worked with the .NET flavor, but I would have thought (and hoped) they developed a workaround for this in .NET.

[searain]

I was an asp programmer now switched to php. But I have to explain why asp is not good to some of my clients who is still on asp.

I think to do dynamically include, asp has some component can be installed and then do it.

The php can run on ISP but the asp with all these components will be very hard to run on apache even if somehow they get asp run on apache.