Incorporating C code

[dtwconsulting]

I apologize if this is a silly question.

Is there a way to call a C program from PHP,ideally one that returns data to the PHP page? Or, is there a way to incorporate C code into HTML that can be called from PHP?

TIA.

[Weedpacket]

For the first question, yes; there are several system functions (listed in the manual under "Program Execution").

For the second question, yes; the Inline_C package at pear.php.net is supposed to do this (but note that it's pretty old and still only at 0.1).