note 97702 deleted from language.references.arent by danbrown

Note Submitter: russrobinson at tectite dot com ---- In my previous post I said: "It is my view that object references in PHP5 are exactly like pointers in C++." "exactly like" is misleading... To clarify: I don't mean PHP5 object references support pointer arithmetic or they contain memory addresses. I mean that, in PHP5, when you pass object variables to functions they *behave* exactly like pointers to objects do in the same situation when writing in C++ (with the exception of the C++ features that just don't exist in PHP, such as pointer arithmetic). Namely, 1. When you pass the object variable, the formal parameter behaves like a C++ pointer to the object inside the function. 2. When you pass the object variable by reference, the formal parameter behaves like a C++ reference to a pointer to the object inside the function. The syntax is different between the languages, but the semantics are identical.