OOP issue

After seeing Andi Gutmans' mail about changing $a['x'] to $a{'x'} to clean up the language I figured it would make sense to discuss some more points on how to enhance the language. The downside is that these changes break existing code but on the other hand PHP4 might be the last chance to fix things. I want to propose changing assignment of objects from copy to reference, i.e. change the semantics of $a = $some_object; to what's currently done by $a = &$some_object; and to introduce $a = clone($some_object); to what's currently done by $a = $some_object. My limited OOP experience tells me that 95% of the time one wants a reference, not a copy. While having the reference operator around is inelegant but working I ran into severe problems trying to iterate through an associative array containing objects: each() and friends always return copies of the contained objects. The best solution I found was doing something like for (reset($b); $object = &$b[key($b)]; next($b)) While copying may work most of the time even when a reference would be more appropriate it adds unnecessary overhead to the program. Opinions? - Chris -- Chris Schneider - mailto:cschneid@relog.ch Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.