note 42842 deleted from zend.arguments.by-reference by vrana

Note Submitter: soletan ---- Guess "Julien CROUZET jucrouzet_at_cpan.org" is wrong. zval is a struct. Since Zend provides access on existing zval containers through pointers, you use zval *ptr; in your code. Managing a pointer to a pointer as a variable in your code is most unusual, complicated and sensible in most cases - easy and clear Zend API is not of that sort. A pointer to a pointer is useful, if a function wants to adjust the pointer pointed to. But that pointer needs some space in memory, which is done using declaration above (it allocates memory on stack to hold a single pointer value, of course you can build pointers on this pointer!). If a function wants to adjust the pointer value, it claims to get a pointer to it in memory, so you have to pass &zval as done in example. (And then this is of type zval **, but only used in this situation!) However the first note in this list is right.