Re: Re: PHP6 return by reference deprecation

On Saturday 02 May 2009 9:30:09 am Colin Guthrie wrote: > '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. That's well and good if the thing you want a single copy of is an object. The way objects pass in PHP 5 makes singletons easy. But I actually just developed a system for PHP 5.2 that includes a class that deliberately allows a caller to reach in and grab an internal array-based data structure for special cases. class Foo { protected $internalConfig = array(...); public function &getConfig() { return $this->internalConfig; } } $foo = new Foo(); ... $config = &$foo->getConfig(); // Do stuff to $config that wouldn't make sense to do via methods. So do I understand the OP correctly that is going to break with PHP 6 now? I certainly hope not, as that would be incredibly short sighted and stupid. There are plenty of use cases for returning by reference besides making PHP 4 objects behave correctly. -- Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com