The future of call time pass-as-reference

After installing PHP 4.2.0 I got the following error-message under a run: "Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated - argument passed by value; If you would like to pass it by reference, modify the declaration of [runtime function name](). If you would like to enable call-time pass-by-reference, you can set allow_call_time_pass_reference to true in your INI file. However, future versions may not support this any longer. " This is actually big news as parameter passing is a fundamental issue. Traditionally function foo($v) called as foo(&$myvar) was regarded as safer coding than function foo(&$v) called as foo($myvar) as in the first case the user would automatically be aware that $myvar could be changed by the function, in the second not. Worse is that in some functions it makes fine sense for the user to have a choice. These functions will be very hard to rewrite as the user will be forced to references in all cases. Finally default parameters are not supported for reference-parameters in the function header. Anyway - it seems that I have to choose between either starting to rewrite quite a lot of code right away or risk being forced to rewrite more later if I use the quick fix with setting allow_call_time_pass_reference to true. Any thoughts? Frank