Why do WordPress developers use so many opening and closing PHP tags when developing themes? [duplicate]

Everyone has got his/her own style of writing code. Personally, I believe that using different opening and closing PHP tags makes the code easy to read and understand. Theme files carry both PHP as well as HTML code, so keeping the code clean in order to make it easy to read becomes important. Adding HTML in between also becomes easy if you separate your PHP statements.

That apart, I don’t think there is any performance compromise if you use PHP open and close tags (please correct me if I’m wrong here). So, why not?! 🙂