Other delimiters can be used on some servers, though most are no longer supported. Examples are:   The syntax of a PHP if ... else statement is as follows:  For single statements, the brackets may be omitted and the if optionally condensed to a single line:  Note that unlike in C, values in case statement can be any type, not just integers. The PHP syntax of a for loop is as follows:  The syntax for a PHP while loop is as follows:  The syntax for a PHP do while loop is as follows:  As in C, variables may be cast to a specific type by prefixing the type in parentheses. PHP treats newlines as whitespace, in the manner of a free-form language. The concatenation operator is codice_18 (dot). Array elements are accessed and set with square brackets in both associative arrays and indexed arrays. Curly brackets can be used to access array elements, but not to assign. PHP has three types of comment syntax: codice_19 which serves as block comments, and codice_20 as well as codice_21 which are used for inline comments. Many examples use the print function instead of the echo function. Both functions are nearly identical; the major difference being that print is slower than echo because the former will return a status indicating if it was successful or not in addition to text to output, whereas the latter does not return a status and only returns the text for output. The usual "Hello World" code example for PHP is:  Hello World! Instead of using codice_3 and the echo statement, an optional "shortcut" is the use of codice_5 instead of codice_3 which implicitly echoes data. For example, to show the page_title:     The above example also illustrates that text not contained within enclosing PHP tags will be directly output. So the simplest form of Hello World in PHP is a plain text file containing "Hello World". PHP offers an alternative syntax using colons rather than the standard curly-brace syntax (of "{...}"). This syntax affects the following control structures: if, while, for, foreach, and switch. The syntax varies only slightly from the curly-brace syntax. In each case the opening brace ({) is replaced with a colon (:) and the close brace is replaced with endif;, endwhile;, endfor;, endforeach;, or endswitch;, respectively. Mixing syntax styles within the same control block is not supported.