PHP Single and Double Quotes: Does It Make a Difference to Energy Consumption?

The increasing rate of carbon and other greenhouse gas emission resulting from the use of IT and other human activities to the atmosphere has become a major source of concern. It has become a matter of great importance for the IT sector to put its house in order by ensuring that its products are effective and efficient, and with little or no negative impact to the environment. Effective and efficient products perform all the intended purposes with reduced consumption of energy resources, and thereby having reduced impact on the environment. Reducing energy consumption of IT products is a key to contributing towards a greener environment. In programming or scripting languages, an end result can be achieved in more than one way. For example, in PHP, a print command can be executed using a single quote and can also be achieved using a double quote, with both achieving the same end-results and without affecting the quality of the intended outcomes. This has led to the research on the energy consumption of selected PHP scripts that perform similar functions: print single and double quote; echo single and double quote, etc… The Joulemeter energy measuring tool is used to measure the amount of energy consumed when run the various PHP scripts.