Oh yes brings back memories from when I worked on vBulletin customizations over a decade ago. No doubt it is a remnant of the early plugin features but also the

Oh yes brings back memories from when I worked on vBulletin customizations over a decade ago. No doubt it is a remnant of the early plugin features but also the hacks one had to employ with PHP before namespaces and a proper OOP structure was introduced. Eval in PHP was the go-to for sorting out versioning mishaps and adding a layer of abstraction when one didn’t exist. It was the Swiss Army knife of making difficult problems disappear so it makes sense to me that they had a specific method for this. Between versions 4 & 5 of PHP depending on whatever VHost was chosen eval was necessary sometimes just to start migrating over to version 5 because you could if...then...rewrite your eval(“new code”).