The point of the question here is if anybody remembers why we decided not
  to parse command line args for the cgi version?  I could easily see it
  being useful to be able to write a cgi script like:
  
    #!/usr/local/bin/php-cgi -d include_path=/path
    <?php
        ...
    ?>
  
  and have it work both from the command line and from a web context.
  
  As far as I can tell this wouldn't conflict with anything, but somebody at
  some point must have had a reason for disallowing this.