Re: $ref =& $this;

From: Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 14:29:30 +0000
Subject: Re: $ref =& $this;
References: 1  Groups: php.internals 
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Hey, I was the original person that started disallowing assigning $this by reference. Question really boils down to, how is this different from the reference fixes we did a couple of weeks ago, where due to too many apps breaking (and a lot broke) we created a work-around for this behavior with a warning. I think this case is pretty much identical, so we should probably treat it as such and escalate to error in 6.0. And At 06:09 AM 10/3/2005, Derick Rethans wrote:
Hello, Dmitry committed a fix earlier to ignore the & in the statement above. I think this is not a good thing to do as it's simply conceptually wrong. The first thing is that ignoring syntax without issuing a warning is dubious because people might think it does actually work, and secondly because I think that the code above is wrong anyway - somewhat in the same way that "$this = new foo();" is wrong. There is never any need to assign $this by reference, nor to pass it by reference to a function as it's an object anyway, making the references pointless - I would even go as far as disallowing passing $this by references to a function - where the reference has to be ignored again, otherwise it allows you to chantge $this to a different object with: class Foo {
        function byRef(&$f) {
                $f = new Bar();
        }
        function modifyThis() {
                $this->byRef($this);
        }
} I think we should prevent people from writing syntax like this, as it is not obvious what is going to happen. This means that we should revert Dmitry's patch. regards, Derick -- Derick Rethans http://derickrethans.nl | http://ez.no | http://xdebug.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
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