The Note You're Voting On
iryoku at terra dot es ¶20 years ago
You should have in mind that php4 keep assigned variables "automagically" referenced until they are overwritten. So the variable copy is not executed on assignment, but on modification. Say you have this:
$var1 = 5;
$var2 = $var1; // In this point these two variables share the same memory location
$var1 = 3; // Here $var1 and $var2 have they own memory locations with values 3 and 5 respectively
Don't use references in function parameters to speed up aplications, because this is automatically done. I think that this should be in the manual, because it can lead to confusion.
More about this here:
http://www.zend.com/zend/art/ref-count.php
