echo not requiring parenthesis

[benstigsen]

Long time since I've been here, but I've been following the project closely.
One thing that I have not been a fan of, is the exception with echo not requiring braces.
It's inconsistent and I'm not quite sure I understand the purpose of it?

[mcfriend99]

echo is a keyword and not a function. It's synonymous to a macro for:

print(x)
print('\n')

since this is a very common use case.

In Blade, keywords do not have braces.

It will seemed really weird (at least to me) to maintain two functions for printing object to screen.

[benstigsen]

I'd much prefer println() and print(),
echo just feels out of place.

println(x) being the equivalent of doing;

print(x)
print('\n')

But nicely wrapped in println() which looks more in place.

[mcfriend99]

I think we can have a middle ground here. We can enable println built-in function and gradually fade out echo. But we'll need more people to vote on this before we can start.

[benstigsen]

That is fair

[Brian3647]

I'm really late! I recently came back to coding a bit after a long time, and I've been very interested in this project again. I definitely think println() would fit way more. It's simply harder to adapt to echo. That being said, if more keywords with similar functionalities were added, maybe echo wouldn't be that bad of an option. Any thoughts 6 months after?