[i]Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion IIT, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.[6] Afterwards, public testing of PHP 3 began, and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend Engine in 1999.[13] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel.[6][/i]
The Scope Resolution Operator (also called Paamayim Nekudotayim) or in simpler terms, the double colon, is a token that allows access to static, constant, and overridden properties or methods of a class.
...
Paamayim Nekudotayim would, at first, seem like a strange choice for naming a double-colon. However, while writing the Zend Engine 0.5 (which powers PHP 3), that's what the Zend team decided to call it. It actually does mean double-colon - in Hebrew
>>13,20
PHP’s parser refers to e.g. :: internally as
T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, and the
<< operator as
T_SL. I
say “internally”, but as above, this is what’s shown to the programmer when :: or
<< appears in the
wrong place.