News Feed
Jobs Feed
Sections




News Archive
Sameer Borate's Blog:
The benefits of colon syntax for control structures
January 15, 2009 @ 08:48:33

In this recent post to his CodeDiesel.com blog, Sameer is promoting the use of colons in control structures over curly braces.

PHP offers a alternative syntax for some of its control structures- if, while, for, foreach, and switch, where you change the opening brace to a colon (:) and the closing brace to endif;, endwhile;, endfor;, endforeach;, or endswitch;, respectively. [...] With the colon syntax you just have to match a '˜if' with a '˜endif' or a '˜for' with a '˜endfor'. When you are mixing HTML with PHP in web pages the code can become quite dense and confusing if it uses a lot of braces.

An example is included showing its use in "if" and "white" statements. With most editors and IDEs supporting brace matching and code folding, this is less of an issue, but it can help make for cleaner code.

1 comment voice your opinion now!
control structure colon curly brace alternative syntax advantage


blog comments powered by Disqus

Similar Posts

Shawn Straton's Blog: Code Readability Part 2, Code Structure

PHP North West: PHPNW10: Harrie Verveer: Database version control without pain

Felix Geisendorfer's Blog: Test Driven Development in Real World Apps

Matthew Weier O'Phinney's Blog: Applying ACLs to Models

Evert Pot's Blog: PHP serializer in userland code


Community Events











Don't see your event here?
Let us know!


podcast database series unittest testing development rest framework release functional community introduction conference usergroup interview phpunit opinion symfony2 language zendframework2

All content copyright, 2013 PHPDeveloper.org :: info@phpdeveloper.org - Powered by the Solar PHP Framework