Re: $ref =& $this;

See my note regarding the fixes we did in the past 1-2 weeks regarding references. It's a huge BC break, and quite frankly, it's not the kind of thing that forces you not to write good code because it's supported. Andi At 07:13 AM 10/3/2005, Marcus Boerger wrote:

Hello Dmitry, that IS NOT proper code and it wasn't in php 4 either, it was only a workaround that is no longer needed. Had the php 4 design been correct in the first place that wouldn't have been allowed in 4 either. Since BC is not working out anyway i see absolutley no reason to encourage people to continue to missuse php. marcus Monday, October 3, 2005, 4:05:56 PM, you wrote: Hi, At first $ref =& $this; produced fatal error because of the bug (not by design). For example $ref->prop =& $this; worked and works without errors. So my patch shouldn't be reverted in any case. At second disallowing such assignments and passign $this by reference will breake a lot of PHP4 code (Mamaba CMS). In PHP4 passing $object by refernce and by value had completely different semantic. I don't see any reason to disallow 100% proper code (like the the following). class Child { function Child($parent) {

    $parent->children[] =& $this;

} } Of course using "=& $this" user can breake $this value, but other languages (C++) allows this too. I don't think we should be paranoiacs. Thanks. Dmitry.

-----Original Message----- From: Derick Rethans [mailto:derick@php.net] Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 5:09 PM To: PHP Developers Mailing List Subject: [PHP-DEV] $ref =& $this; Hello, Dmitry committed a fix earlier to ignore the & in the statement above. I think this is not a good thing to do as it's simply conceptually wrong. The first thing is that ignoring syntax without issuing a warning is dubious because people might think it does actually work, and secondly because I think that the code above is wrong anyway - somewhat in the same way that "$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

Best regards, Marcus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

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