note 59204 deleted from language.references.return by nlopess

Note Submitter: dark.ryder ---- "Do not use return-by-reference to increase performance, the engine is smart enough to optimize this on its own. Only return references when you have a valid technical reason to do it!" Just to be clear about this (and correct me if I'm wrong), returning by reference is only necessary when returning a reference to something outside the function's local scope? For example, it is reasonable to return-by-reference a reference to a globally-scoped or object-scoped variable, but not to return a reference to a multi-megabyte array which only exists in the function's local scope, because PHP is smart enough to return the array by reference automatically to avoid unnecessary memory thrashing?