Oh I didn't mean it figured stuff out in a smart way, only that it did auto buffering/chuncking/flushing for you in a way to abstract that whole idea from the dev, while other plateform had you care about it (cf above messages).

But yeah the moment you ended up wanting to do anything advanced, you were doing your own buffer on top of that anyway, or disabling it and going raw.

and the joy of "pure php scripts" with closing ?> tags messing with the output when you didn't want it... all in libraries you had no say...

I can't say I miss those days ! Or this platform for that matter.

Eventually people started omitting ?> at the very end, which is correct but also unsettling.

When I started my first job, I was like "Hey, these files don't have a closing ?>!!" and then my boss sighed.

It's even recommended in the PHP docs: https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.phptags....

so irksome having to leave the tags unbalanced!