Please confirm behaviour of ZEND_ACC_STATIC

in my extension, i have a class which has methods which work slightly differently depending on whether or not they are called statically. as an example : $original = new UnicodeString("HELLO WORLD","utf8"); $lower = UnicodeString::toLowerCase($original); /* returns a new copy */ $lower1 = $original->toLowerCase(); /* original is lowercased. return a reference */ the latter is for efficiency. imagine chains like print_r($original->reverse()->toTitleCase()->split(" ")); /* no intermediaries created work on $original*/ while the former allows for transformations without affecting the original string. since the method can behave statically, it is marked as ZEND_ACC_STATIC. however it appears that once marked as such, getThis() always reports NULL. i've confirmed that marking it as non static cause the object to be properly passed. is this a WAD. if so, is it possible (at least for internal functions) for a method to be called statically as well as in an object context ? l0t3k