Re: semicolon terminator for switch cases

Hi Ilija, Ilija Tovilo wrote:

Looking through the language grammer I discovered that switch cases can also be terminated with a ; instead of a :.

switch ($i) {
     case 1;
         return 1;
     default;
         return 2;
}

https://3v4l.org/o7nD8 This is in fact documented: https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.switch.php What's the reasoning behind this? I find it weird an inconsistent.

For whatever reason, I somehow remember that this dates to at least PHP/FI 2.0, which means it's as least as old as me (24 years… no, I was not involved with PHP back then ;). And indeed, the case statement is mentioned in the manual (https://www.php.net/manual/phpfi2.php#lang), with an example to be found in https://museum.php.net/php2/php-2.0.tar.gz under php-2.0/test/lang/003.tst:

    --TEST--
    Simple Switch Test                                            ...
    --POST--
    --GET--
    --FILE--
    <?$a=1;
      switch($a);
        case 0;
            echo "bad";
            break;
        case 1;
            echo "good";
            break;
        default;
            echo "bad";
            break;
      endswitch>
    --EXPECT--
    Content-type: text/html
    good

Being able to use a colon instead of a semicolon here is, I guess, a more modern thing. Was it PHP 3 or PHP 4 that changed this? Who knows. I don't think it's hurting anyone as it is… can we leave it in peace? :) Thanks, Andrea