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Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2005 15:09:22 +0200 (CEST)
To: PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: $ref =& $this;
From: derick@php.net (Derick Rethans)

Hello,

Dmitry committed a fix earlier to ignore the & in the statement above. I 
think this is not a good thing to do as it's simply conceptually wrong. 
The first thing is that ignoring syntax without issuing a warning is 
dubious because people might think it does actually work, and secondly 
because I think that the code above is wrong anyway - somewhat in the 
same way that "$this = new foo();" is wrong.

There is never any need to assign $this by reference, nor to pass it by 
reference to a function as it's an object anyway, making the references 
pointless - I would even go as far as disallowing passing $this by 
references to a function - where the reference has to be ignored again, 
otherwise it allows you to chantge $this to a different object with:

class Foo {
	function byRef(&$f) {
		$f = new Bar();
	}

	function modifyThis() {
		$this->byRef($this);
	}
}

I think we should prevent people from writing syntax like this, as it is 
not obvious what is going to happen. This means that we should revert 
Dmitry's patch.

regards,
Derick

-- 
Derick Rethans
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org