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 ($test) {
echo "<p>".time()."</p>";
}
?>
(The ironic thing about this is that echo statement would look even
better if time was variable declared in the controller, because then you could just embed the variable in the string instead of concatenating)
Listing 4-5 - The Alternative PHP Syntax, Good for Templates
<p>Hello, world!</p>
<?php if ($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?
