Programming PHP, 3rd Edition

Lexical Structure

The lexical structure of a programming language is the set of basic rules that governs how you write programs in that language. It is the lowest-level syntax of the language and specifies such things as what variable names look like, what characters are used for comments, and how program statements are separated from each other.

Case Sensitivity

The names of user-defined classes and functions, as well as built-in constructs and keywords such as echo, while, class, etc., are case-insensitive. Thus, these three lines are equivalent:

echo("hello, world");
ECHO("hello, world");
EcHo("hello, world");

Variables, on the other hand, are case-sensitive. That is, $name, $NAME, and $NaME are three different variables.

Statements and Semicolons

A statement is a collection of PHP code that does something. It can be as simple as a variable assignment or as complicated as a loop with multiple exit points. Here is a small sample of PHP statements, including function calls, assignment, and an if statement:

echo "Hello, world";
myFunction(42, "O'Reilly");
$a = 1;
$name = "Elphaba";
$b = $a / 25.0;
if ($a == $b) {
  echo "Rhyme? And Reason?";
}

PHP uses semicolons to separate simple statements. A compound statement that uses curly braces to mark a block of code, such as a conditional test or loop, does not need a semicolon after a closing brace. Unlike in other languages, in PHP the semicolon before the closing brace is not optional:

if ($needed) {
  echo "We must have it!";  // semicolon required ...