From what I understood from Andi, references in PHP are closer to hardlinks in Unix, than to pointers in C. Meaning, you cannot really spot
them. is_ref flag you see there is more auxiliary internal flag and is
has more meanings that just "is it reference or not". Maybe somebody
should write an essay on this matter (in fact, I know only two mean who
could, but I'm not sure they will have time to do it), because it is
widely misunderstood.
It would be a great move towards cleaning up the misunderstanding to implement (that´s possible when you´ve finished your work on var_dump()) that a variable is displayed once and all other referenced ones are displaying sth like
*object(foo) <=> object(boo)*
without displaying the values again, it needs documentation then that it does not mean that it is a link or an alias to that object rather than indication that these values are the same, thus choosen the <=> and eleminated all &´s from everywhere in var_dump()s output
regards
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