I am currently learning symfony and going through the book A Gentle Introduction to symfony and came across this section in "Chapter 4: The Basics of Page Creation" on creating templates (or views):
"If you need to execute some PHP code in the template, you should avoid using the usual PHP syntax, as shown in Listing 4-4. Instead, write your templates using the PHP alternative syntax, as shown in Listing 4-5, to keep the code understandable for non-PHP programmers."
Listing 4-4 - The Usual PHP Syntax, Good for Actions, But Bad for Templates
<p>Hello, world!</p>
<?php
if ($test) {
echo "<p>".time()."</p>";
}
?>
(The ironic thing about this is that the echo statement would look even better if time was a variable declared in the controller because then you could just embed the variable in the string instead of concatenating)
Listing 4-5 - The Alternative PHP Syntax, Good for Templates
<p>Hello, world!</p>
<?php if ($test): ?>
<p><?php echo time(); ?>
</p><?php endif; ?>
I fail to see how listing 4-5 makes the code "understandable for non-PHP programmers", and its readability is shaky at best. 4-4 looks much more readable to me. Are there any programmers who are using symfony that write their templates like those in 4-4 rather than 4-5? Are there reasons I should use one over the other? There is the very slim chance that somewhere down the road someone less technical could be editing it the template, but how does 4-5 actually make it more understandable to them?
