note 76548 deleted from language.functions by levim

Note Submitter: wassermann at REMOVEucdavis dot edu ---- deek at none dot net, The explanation of why your example does what it does is not quite right. function ChangeString(&$SuplyedString) { $SuplyedString = "BBB"; }; ChangeString($AAA='AAA'); print $AAA; exit; The assignment does, in fact, get executed before the function call. The reason that this prints 'AAA' is because '=' is an operator that returns the value that it assigned. In this case, the value 'AAA' is assigned to the variable $AAA, and the assignment expression returns a value of 'AAA'. It is this returned value that gets passed as an argument to the function, and this returned value is unconnected to the variable $AAA. $AAA = 'AAA'; ChangeString($AAA); print $AAA; exit; In this case, a reference to the variable is being passed. Hope this helps...