My posts in English have illustrated a point . My sympathies if they flew over your head . <| sep |> You can ' t fit test away the fact that rubber doesn ' t seal against skin that ' s covered in hair . <| sep |> 1 . upto 3 . map a a 2 . map b div id '#' Perfectly doable . Not readable , nor are your examples . But doable nonetheless . The reason why people prefer clear and consise do . end blocks is because your examples are horrible in readability . After 15 years of nearly fulltime PHP devving , I know my PHP , but I had a hard time understanding what your last two examples where doing . They would certainly not ever pass a codereview by me , though . I assume you are in some view or template layer , seeing as you are opening and closing tags , so let ' s compare to a reasonably clean ERB counterpart % ' div id # a 2 ' if a 2 % id '' with single quotes ? really ? a numericonly id is not even valid HTML . no closing tag . I ' d argue that multiplying with a magic number 2 is never a good thing , let alone in a view .