note 56454 deleted from language.references.pass by danbrown

Note Submitter: bobbykjack at hotmail dot com ---- In response to mogmios, I think the problem may be similar to one I experienced. It seems that reference parameters cannot be assigned a default value and, taking into account what can be passed by reference, the only way I could achieve this functionality was with the following code: <?php class tree { var $parentNode; var $childNodes; function tree(&$parentNode) { if ($parentNode) $this->parentNode =& $parentNode; } } $null = ''; $parent = new tree($null); $child = new tree($parent); echo '<pre>';print_r($child);echo '</pre>'; ?> It's a nasty hack, but I cannot find a good alternative. The above script produces the following output: tree Object ( [parentNode] => tree Object ( [parentNode] => [childNodes] => ) [childNodes] => ) which is sparse, but technically correct (you can test this by expanding the implementation and making use of $childNodes). Note that this was tested under PHP 4.3.10 and PHP 5 has almost certainly changed this behaviour.