Memory corruption in Zend, should we allow this?

Hi have found an interesting behaviour, watch below... 1) $foobar->rfoo=&$a; $foobar->r2foo=&$foobar->rfoo; $foobar->rfoo=4; What are we assigning 4 here to? The first question is, should we allow this? I think no, references to non-existing variables should be disallowed (although Zend allows a lot, this is no good). This is not even a reference to a variable, which could have been magically created, named ${''} or another undefined variable, let's say $b... 2) I tried to simply do a echo $a; afterwards and wow!!! It works, sometimes! Intermittently PHP crashes, without reasons, in this case I put this code below by accident

function strlens($string)    { return $string; }

ob_start('strlens'); echo '<PRE>'; var_dump($foobar); echo '</PRE>'; ob_end_flush(); I do not know what this crash relates to what made me assuming Zend randomly corrupted some memory using this undefined behaviour? If I put a die() below the echo it works in any case... +1 disallowing this or modifying behaviour that it does nothing or anything else but referencing to nirvana andré -- · André Langhorst t: +49 331 5811560 · · andre@php.net m: +49 173 9558736 · * PHP Quality Assurance http://qa.php.net *