note 23187 deleted from language.variables.scope by dams

It appears that in PHP4, the global statement creates a local reference to the global variable, rather than actually putting the global variable into the local scope. To illustrate, I have a function which needs to access a global array, and ensure it doesn't have previous values before setting its own. I was doing this: function myfunc() { global $somearray; unset($somearray); $somearray[] = $stuff; } In PHP3 (which didn't have variable references), this worked fine. However, in PHP4, all it's doing is unsetting the local *reference*, without affecting the global variable in any way.