Most PHP programmes may not be familiar with the colon syntax used for control structures. If you regularly code in wordpress than you already are acquainted with it.
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. The main advantage I’ve found in using this syntax is that it makes deeply nested code intelligible to read. If you have a deeply nested code it sometime becomes hard to pair the starting and ending brace. 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. At that time the colon syntax can come quite handy.
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