In php it's http://www.perlmonks.org/test.php?id=1 in order to pass the variable $id=1 to the test.php program.

I believe that this is only true if your PHP environment has "register_globals" turned on. And since PHP 4.2.0 this directive defaults to being turned off. It sounds like the PHP developers have finally realised what a huge security hole this presents (as explained by tinita).