Re: Proposal: new magic methods for Object references.

"Matīss Roberts Treinis" <mrtreinis@gmail.com> wrote: >Proposal: > >Two additional magic methods for PHP objects - > >__refer(void): > >Refer method is called whenever object's identifier is assigned to >variable, if such method is present. >Example: > >$foo = new Bar; >$bar = $foo; //__refer invoked This assignment is handled using PHP's copy on write mechanism for any variable. A change here has massive impact on any variable assignment, function parameter passing, ... and tons of internal places. What we have is a hook for the objects own reference counting which is affected when an object refering to an object is used in write-context by the engine, that might easily be exteded but is rather useless. (It's trivial to create an interface or abstract base class providing this addref/delref info) Unless you can provide a robust good patch without performance penalty in cases where this isn't used this will lead nowhere, and I doubt there is a way to come up with that. (rewriting the engine might be the closest approach) johannes