Re: [Fofredux-devel] reference passing

[Kevin <ke...@dr...>]

Evan Roth wrote:
> Hey Kev (especially),
>
> I've been overwhelmed at work this week, so have had no time (but we 
> were featured on boingboing today with our car towers!).
>
> in any case, i've been browsing through all your updates.  is there a 
> reason that we are passing almost everything by reference?  i remember 
> reading somewhere that =& is deprecated in php5 and causes some sort 
> of undesired side effect...but not sure of the details. 

It's what I'm used to with php4.  To pass by reference on a return value 
you have to declare it on both sides of the function/method call.  I 
probably have gone overboard on using pass by reference.  I'm used to 
other languages that do it exclusively by default. (java & python)   In 
some cases I really want a reference passed around to keep the values 
inside the object consistent.  In other cases I do it to avoid the 
(potentially costly) copy of an object, or collection of objects.  I 
know, I know, that is premature optimization which is a no-no.

I started using a logging function that gives very verbose output.  I 
can now see all the places I've used either incorrect or deprecated 
reference passing.  I'll try to clean it up.

-Kevin