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Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 07:29:30 -0700
To: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>,
	PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] $ref =& $this;
From: andi@zend.com (Andi Gutmans)

Hey,

I was the original person that started disallowing assigning $this by 
reference.
Question really boils down to, how is this different from the 
reference fixes we did a couple of weeks ago, where due to too many 
apps breaking (and a lot broke) we created a work-around for this 
behavior with a warning.
I think this case is pretty much identical, so we should probably 
treat it as such and escalate to error in 6.0.

And

At 06:09 AM 10/3/2005, Derick Rethans wrote:
>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
>
>--
>PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
>To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php


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