Re: PHP 5.0.3 losing $this

> Yermo, > > Essentially, what Andi was saying is that we need your help in order for > us to help you. To put it more clearly - even if there is a bug in the > language engine or some other component of PHP - it's impossible for us to > figure out what it is, unless we're provided with a reproducible test case > that's small enough to analyze. yea, like I was saying there are so often cases with PHP that you have a very specific situation where it's dumping core and you make the /slightest/ change and it no longer exhibits the problem .. only to crop up again months later in another very annoying/very specific instance. In the most extreme case I've seen removing a single character from a string in an array be the difference between symbol table corruption/coredump and running fine. What I'm hearing is that unless I can reproduce it in a small script I should not bother reporting it. Correct? >>Maybe there should be a "What to do when you can't reproduce it in a few >>lines of code" page to help guys like me out. > > That's not a bad idea! It turns out that, at least in this instance, the source of my problem was incorrectly using parentheses on return()'s when returning references. If I understand correctly ()'s indicate an expression in this context and expressions cannot evaluate to references ... what's weird is that I've been doing it that way for the last 4 years with little ill effect. It does look like the situation is not being caught correctly, however, as returning a reference in a parenthetical expression will, under some circumstances, cause a coredump. I believe because PHP doesn't handle the "trying to dereference a NULL pointer as an object reference" case sometimes. (again, random core dump. I don't have a demo script.) Just an FYI. Thanks for your time and attention, -- Yermo ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- DTLink Software http://www.dtlink.com Desktop Software and Web Applications ----------------------------------------------------------------------------