That's what I, and many others, dislike about Smarty. In my humble opinion, it's not worth the files it's written in. Making up your own pseudo code that will be parsed by PHP may seem fun to begin with, but before you know it, you've written an entirely new programming language, and let's be honest, we don't need any unnecessary languages to learn!

In the beginning, PHP used to be like that, in fact PHP used to be shown in HTML comments and then interpreted with a C/C++ application. Thankfully it's since moved away from that area. If you want to use an if statement in your HTML, use a PHP if statement!

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.