Dirt-simple PHP templates… can this work without `eval`?

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PHP was itself originally intended as a templating language (ie a simple method of allowing you to embed code inside HTML).

As you see from your own examples, it got too complicated to justify being used in this way most of the time, so good practice moved away from that to using it more as a traditional language, and only breaking out of the <?php ?> tags as little as possible.

The trouble was that people still wanted a templating language, so platforms like Smarty were invented. But if you look at them now, Smarty supports stuff like its own variables and foreach loops… and before long, Smarty templates start to have the same issues as PHP templates used to have; you may as well just have used native PHP in the first place.

What I’m trying to say here is that the ideals of a simple templating language aren’t actually that easy to get right. It’s virtually impossible to make it both simple enough not to scare off the designers and at the same time give it enough flexibility to actually do what you need it to do.

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