assign by reference

Would be nice to use a reference so that changes to the variable can be made during Smarty template processing. In our case, we assign() our Application object to smarty when we instantiate smarty. Many configuration changes happen to the App object after the assignment before template processing. Those changes cant be seen because smarty stored a copy of the variable. It would be nice to allow smarty to assign by reference in such instances. Performance buffs would/should use this method regardless to reduce the memory overhead of copying the variable. However, this would remove the capability to use an array in the assignment, since you cant assign a default value in the function definition for values passed by reference. /*======================================================================*\ Function: assign_by_ref() Purpose: assigns values to template variables using references Parameters: $tpl_var - Name of the variable $value - A reference to the variable contents \*======================================================================*/ function assign_by_ref($tpl_var, &$value) { if ($tpl_var != '' && isset($value)) $this->_tpl_vars[$tpl_var] = &$value; $this->_extract = true; }