What are the advantages to putting your Javascript in a .php file?

Question

I occasionally come across pages where some Javascript is included via a PHP file:

Answer 1

There's no benefit for the example you gave above (beyond peculiar deployment scenarios where you have access to .php files and not .js files, which would be insane but not unheard of).

That said, this approach allows you to pass the JS through the php parser - which means you can generate your JS dynamically based on server variables.