As you can see I boldly used the function reference_count(Object) even though it doesn't exist. This is exactly what I'd need to allow my concept to work. I keep thinking of any other solutions, but up until now, I didn't find any better solution for this problem. Of course I can
Note that the engine does not guarantee you any particular value of the refcount. Passing parameters around, accessing variables, etc. may change the refcount. One thing the engine guarantees you is that once no links to the variable exist it would be destroyed (which may not happen immediately after you do unset, for example, but probably would happen "soon"). So actually figuring out if the object is referenced by any other place could prove non-trivial, depending on the application structure.
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Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Products Engineer
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/