Lazare,
>> This won't make it easy passing a variable as reference.
>
> Type casting combined with passing by reference is problematic in many ways.
No it's not. The core functionality does it quite fine, and it uses
typed parameters...
> Just an example:
>
> fuction foo( string & $buffer) { ... }
> foo( $my_buffer );
>
> Here, $my_buffer has just been declared, so it is null. Should this be an
> error? I don't know! So, I think that that passing by reference should not
> be (immediately) supported.
This one one where my wants are superseded by existing functionality.
The current implementation has a definite answer to that. And the
answer is that no, no notice is raised. Plenty of people are using it
to that effect right now. Check out this abomination:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9636052/is-there-a-way-to-pass-an-undeclared-variable-to-a-function-without-notice/9636395#9636395
However, it's also quite useful. Look at your code base. Whenever
you call preg_match with the third parameter, do you *always*
initialize the $match parameter? And do you *always* make sure it's
an array? The chances are very likely (based on a lot of the code
I've seen), no.
This functionality is very pervasive to the core, and we shouldn't go
changing it now (even implementing user-land pass-by-reference). Not
supporting references is one thing, but changing the semantics of it
is a completely different talk...
Anthony
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