PHP and Perl are basically like Spanish and Italian when it comes to syntax. Both can more or less interoperate with the assistance of lots of hand gestures and facial expressions.

Ditto. I'm positive that code would be valid Perl with the right libraries.

Which isn't saying much.

Same here, because I knew they intersected and presumed it was a trick question. Technically, I believe it is neither valid perl nor PHP because it's missing an opening brace on one of the if statements.

PHP lets you skip using curly braces for conditionals. I've seen real-world code which used this style only once, and it was about as bad as you'd expect.

Yeah, I suspected that, but it looked like there was a close brace and no open brace. (I only noticed because I was specifically looking at the braces to try to determine if it was PHP.)

The lovely globals (e.g. `$_GET`) are what give PHP away.

Can concur. I managed to get all correct, but that one question that almost tripped me was the PHP question.

As an ex-perl dev, (looks at self) shrugs in disbelief!

I did that too, and in the same situation (although I got more wrong).