Re: Fw: [PHP-WIN] Passing by reference...

Understood.. as far as I can answer your question... I'd have to say that yes it does 'break' the 'rule' and that it is still the 'preached' method to avoid such things.

One of the fundamental rules of blackbox programming is that a function should never change the value of a global variable. And there are very compelling reasons why this rule exists. I'm simply suggesting that "passing by reference" as a programming "technique" breaks this fundamental rule.....although I am not suggesting that passing by reference is in itself a "bad thing"....perhaps a necessary evil. All I'm saying is ....have the "rules" changed since I left Uni? Ignatius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Pac mon" <cake27@hotmail.com> To: <php-windows@lists.php.net> Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 2:30 PM Subject: Re: Fw: [PHP-WIN] Passing by reference... Some teachers will say this just because they think students are dumb. The reasoning behind it is that 'if we teach them to pass by reference some other dumb programmer can accidentally change values around and break stuff!' Simpletons!

Isn't passing by reference a "no-no" is terms of good programming? At

least

that's what I was told when I studied programming about 12 years ago? Ignatius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthony Ritter" <tony@gonefishingguideservice.com> To: <php-windows@lists.php.net> Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 2:40 PM Subject: Re: [PHP-WIN] Passing by reference...

Michael Sims wrote in message:

Yes, that is true. The "tax" function has the ampersand in the

argument

list, which means that any variable that you send to it gets

passed by

reference. This means that any changes to that variable that

occur

inside

the function will actually affect the same variable that is in the

scope

of

the main script. Without the ampersand, the function will only

modify

it's

own local copy of the variable and leave the one in the main

script

unaltered. If you remove the ampersand from the above script and

re-run

it, then the output of the first echo statement should not change,

but

the

second one will change to 2500 since the function will no longer

be

altering the variable in the main script. http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.references.pass.php Sorry if I'm not understanding your question...

.................................... Thanks for the reply Michael. You've answered my question. A happy and healthy new year to you and yours. Tony Ritter -- PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-windows-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-windows-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail:

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