Please don't take any of this as black and white, because I really
have never looked at the PHP code myself (except via stories like[1]).
However, from what I can tell there is basically no clean separation
between parser and interpreter/VM in PHP like there is in Lua. Don't
forget that PHP stands for Hypertext *Preprocessor*... it's amazing
(though I guess actually not) in this light that we ever got to the
point where people are writing daemons in PHP.
Regards,
Matthew
[1]: http://use.perl.org/~Aristotle/journal/33448
