Re: PHP6 return by reference deprecation

'Twas brillig, and Paul M Foster at 02/05/09 06:07 did gyre and gimble:

If this is going away, how do you return things by reference, so as to ensure a single copy of something (yes, I know the singleton pattern can be used; I do use it as well; it's more complicated)?

You'll want to use the Singleton design pattern here. Let's say you're config object is a class. Something like this should work very nicely. class My_Config { private function __construct() {

    // Whatever you need to do to load the config

} public static function getInstance() {

    static $instance = null;
    if (null === $instance)
      $instance = new self();
    return $instance;

} } Then in your code whenever you want to get your config object you would call: $config = My_Config::getInstance(); You'll only every get one object created due to the private constructor and which enforces the use of the getInstance() method. This is a very common design pattern, and is ideally suited to this use case. HTHs Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]