There is no technical difference between the two syntaxes. I used to use the curly braces but now a days I prefer to use this short-hand alternative syntax because of code readability and accessibility. And especially, If you want to use PHP as your templating language in your view files(the V of MVC), the first one is better.

The only reason you might find it easier to use the curly brace syntax is that many code editors will match beginning and ending braces to show you where that particular code block starts and stops. This can be useful in debugging.

If you use the alternate syntax and have a bunch of endif; statements floating around, you're never sure which if statement they match up with.

The standard is using curly braces for scripting.

The only time if $foo: end if; type syntax is generally used is in some templating systems like WordPress's.

Otherwise braces are almost always used.

Personally I find the whole if(): endif; thing rather annoying, and never use it. And my IDE highlights the opening and closing brackets as pointed out above, so those are much better for my purposes. There's no technical difference however

thanks guys.

and yeah, my introduction to php was wordpress so I'm a little brainwashed by how they did things.