Question

I was reading some switch statements and noticed one using endswitch;. Why or why not should one use this? Is it even necessary?

Answer 1

It is used if you use the alternative syntax for control structures.

Thus you could either choose

switch ($var) {
    case 1:
        echo "Hello!\n";
        break;
    case 2:
        echo "Goodbye!\n";
        break;
    default:
        echo "I only understand 1 and 2.\n";
}

or

switch ($var):
    case 1:
        echo "Hello!\n";
        break;
    case 2:
        echo "Goodbye!\n";
        break;
    default:
        echo "I only understand 1 and 2.\n";
endswitch;

They are functionally identical, and merely provided as syntactic sugar.