What does wrapping a procedural block in curly braces do in php?

Question

I was going through some of the code for Dolphin CMS recently (a craptastic example for PHP haters) when I ran across this little gem in /grp.php:

{
    switch ( $_REQUEST['action'] ) {
        //a crapton of switch statements
    }
}

I'm curious what the wrapping curly braces, "{}" without any keywords, are about. I do PHP development primarily so maybe (hopefully??!!?) this is something I just don't know about but I've tried removing the braces and the code runs as usual.

I'm having a hard time understanding wtf the purpose for this would be.

Any ideas?

(NOTE: This is really just for my own edification. I'm almost having trouble sleeping because this isn't making any sense to me...)

Answer 1

I've seen this in large blocks of procedural code. It seems to help group logical blocks together that might normally be abstracted to a separate function. This, somewhat, helps when editing and your IDE can quickly identify the block by the braces.

Functionally, I don't think it does anything. Visually, it helps group code.