NYCPHP Meetup

[Cliff Hirsch]

On 11/19/07 1:27 PM, "Gary Mort" <bz-gmort at beezifies.com> wrote:
> Cliff Hirsch wrote:
>> The php manual says:
>> ³In recent versions of PHP you will get a warning saying that
>> "Call-time pass-by-reference" is deprecated when you use a & in foo(&$a);²
>> Why is this? Besides being ugly, difficult to understand and not very
>> elegant, is there any reason technical reason why this is deprecated?
>> 
> Because if you declare it in the function:
> function foo(&$mya) {
> }
> 
> Than you have told PHP that whenever this function is used, variables
> should be passed by reference and not copied.
> 
> So the thinking is, you should know ahead of time whether or not you
> want to pass by reference or pass a copy, and not decide to do it at the
> time you call your code.
> 
> IE, don't do:
> foo(&$a);

Ah, I got it. Pass-by-reference in the function call is what's depricated.
As in foo(&$a); (as you noted above).

Pass-by-reference in the function definition is not depricated. As in
public function Thefunction(&$varref) {
}

Still ugly and error prone compared to clean oop, but passing objects around
is sort of the same thing and infinitely more confusing.