Use print().

@requinix, is there any reason echo can't be tweaked to behave in the same manner?

echo is *not* a function - it's a language costruct
echo $a, "\n", $b, "\n";

this would not be possible with a function and the difference is that is saves a ton of concat calls compared to echo $a.  "\n" . $b . "\n" which does exactly the same but becaus eof the repeatet concat a ton of in-memory-copies a triggered which can be expensive depending on the string sizes

> is there any reason echo can't be tweaked to behave in the same manner?
Because there's no reason to? echo and print are both doing exactly what they're intended to do.

Since echo is not a function, you cannot do

$var ? echo 'abc' : echo 'xyz';

also. It's not a function, so echo wouldn't return absolutely nothing. Therefore, it cannot be used anywhere expression is expected.

I was assuming since neither are language constructs, they could share the same "return" semantics. Your explanation, however, helps clarify that. Thanks for taking the time to highlight it, learnt something new.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.echo.php

echo is not actually a function (it is a language construct), so you are not required to use parentheses with it. echo (unlike some other language constructs) does not behave like a function, so it cannot always be used in the context of a function. Additionally, if you want to pass more than one parameter to echo, the parameters must not be enclosed within parentheses.