Hi,
There are three purposes:
1) At call time, nothing significes what is the caller passing, the syntax
is the same for passing reference or passing value, so it's prone to
confusion. You're passing something which *may* or *may not* be modified if
taken as a reference. Quick, is the variable taken by reference here
somefunction($hi). A more clear version of the syntax is what I covered in
my original email, where declaring function foo(& $foo) is a sort of
contract that *forces* (with error) that the variable is passed by reference
at call time, thus making the actions of the function explicit.
2) There's a broken symmetry here. While passing by reference is implicit at
call time, at return time it's not. I need to both declare the function
return by reference AND use "= & " to assign the results. Otherwise I get a
copy. That's a problem I often have. There's no compiler error to warn me I
did otherwise.
I'd rather all those be explicit( require pass/return by val, require
pass/return by refr: "&", accepts both "&?"), and the strict cases throw
errors when the contract is not met at both sides.
3) As I mentioned there are three use cases, of which we support two, which
I covered in my original email.
The reason I said "in a perfect world" is because the current "hidden" pass
by reference at call time will be incompatible with that scheme, so I doubt
anyone would consider it.
Regards,
Stan Vassilev
Hi!
In a perfect world, here's how I'd do it, of course the actual syntax can
be something else (this also improves the understanding of the code as it
makes the intent explicit, versus implicit at call time, as it is now):
---
function foo(& $a) {} // allows only explicit pass by reference
foo($a); // illegal, error
foo(& $a); // legal, pass by reference
I'm not sure I understand what's the purpose of this. Passing by reference
means that function may modify it's parameter. I see no reason why such
function should be called with some special syntax, could you explain?
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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