Is there an advantage to using Laravel's built-in control structures vs using raw php?

Blade views in Laravel provide many control structures (if, loops, switches) using the @ symbol which seem to work well, but I'm wondering if there's any advantage to using those over their equivalent raw php commands.

For example, in Laravel an if statement would look like:

@if(statement)
    some html
@endif 

and the equivalent raw php would look like:

<? if(statement) {?>
    some html
<? } ?>

I'm upgrading an application to Laravel from a Zend Framework v1 backend and have been switching over to using laravel's control structures but am wondering if there's really an advantage other than sticking to laravel's standards?

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