How can PHP developers optimize the code snippet provided to improve performance and readability?

The issue with the code snippet is that it uses multiple concatenation operations within a loop, which can be inefficient and impact performance. To optimize the code, we can use an array to store the strings and then join them using the implode function after the loop. This approach improves both performance and readability of the code.

// Original code snippet
$output = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
    $output .= 'Number: ' . $i . '<br>';
}

// Optimized code snippet
$output = [];
for ($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) {
    $output[] = 'Number: ' . $i;
}
echo implode('<br>', $output);