Syntax Basics

Before you do this episode, go watch the Fundamentals of Syntax. Seriously, do it now. This episode will help you to understand what it is and why we need syntax.

Your natural language needs a set of rules in order for you and me to understand one another. We put sentences together based upon those rules. For example, if I said:

“Tonya woman engineer”

would you know what I was talking about or the context of what I meant? Not necessarily. Why? Because it’s not a complete sentence. It’s just words. We need to understand the basic rules of language in order to properly communicate and understand the meaning.

This applies to programming too. Programming languages use rules too in order to process and run your code. The rules are called syntax.

Remember, computers are stupid, but fast. They cannot infer, reason, think, or figure out what the heck you meant to type. If you misspell an instruction or variable, the language and computer cannot say “Well, I know that you meant to type add_action even though you actually typed add_actin. So I’ll go ahead and run the right instruction.” No, computers don’t do that unless you write a program to do it.

PHP defines a set of rules about how you structure an instruction. Remember that the computer runs one instruction at a time. You are telling the computer what to do, step-by-step, one instruction at a time.

The PHP interpreter first has to identify what you what it to do. What task do you want it to run? It uses the syntax to parse out the task. And then it runs it.

In this episode, we’ll talk about syntax, what it is, and why you need to learn to properly structure your code. Then we’ll talk about some basics such as:

• End of instruction with a semi-colon ;
• Parentheses for passing information to be worked on or stored
• Code block declarations using curly braces {}
• Telling PHP “Hey, this code is PHP” using <?php

Test Your New Knowledge

Why does syntax matter in programming?

It’s the way programming languages can get the computer to run the code. Structure and format matter.

How does PHP know that the code is actually PHP and not HTML or something else?

<?php identifies that the code after it is to be run as PHP. It runs the code from the opening tag until it finds the closing tag, ?>, or the end of the file.

Why do instructions need parentheses?

PHP requires the parentheses to identify that this is an instruction, i.e. a function or method to run. Then you can pass information to that instruction for it to work on it or even store it away.

Learn More

Here is a FREE lab that teaches you about syntax in a more language agnostic approach.

Episode #3
08:57 Runtime

Fundamentals of Syntaxfree

Lab: Building Blocks of Programming

Let's talk about the fundamentals of syntax. Language has structure and set of rules. We call this syntax. You'll learn what it is and why language needs it.

Learn more