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Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 18:41:26 -0400
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To: Brian Moon <brianm@dealnews.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Passing functions to function by reference
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Brian Moon wrote:
> In PHP4, you could do:
> 
> function test()
> {
>        return array(1,2,3);
> }
> 
> $var = array_shift(test());
> 
> PHP 5.0 broke this.  There was a fatal error on the array_shift that 
> only variables could be passed by reference.  There was a good argument 
> for it.  So, we started migrating our code.
> 
> Well, seems this works in 5.1.  So, my question is, was it an 
> intentional "fix" or will this break again and we need to continue to 
> watch for this?

In 5.1 this now throws an E_STRICT instead of a warning.  It is still a 
bad idea to pass a tempvar by reference, so yes, you should strive to 
write E_STRICT clean code.

-Rasmus