Robert Cummings wrote:
Well there "was" a segfault, but that's fixed now, now the warning is
thrown because of some purist attitude that says it's incorrect to pass
a literal to a reference expecting parameter... I can see how that's an
issue in C with pointers, or in a strongly type language like Java, but
part of PHP's popularity is that while it shares a lot of functions with
C, it is neither C nor Java, but rather a much simpler system that
generally for all the novices out there "works well".
Stuff like this is a bug in your code. It has nothing to do with purism:
function inc_arg(&$arg) {
$arg++;
}
inc_arg(3);
You have specifically defined your function to modify the argument yet
you pass it something that has no storage and thus there is no way to
use that modification. For the most part I agree that we need to keep
the language as flexible and forgiving as possible, but where we are
able to detect code that obviously doesn't do what the programmer
intended, it is tremendously helpful to get a descriptive error.
As far as functions returning references, you are right that returning a
literal there sometimes makes sense, but this can also hide a bug which
is why this only throws a notice.
You could argue that we could try to look ahead and see what is actually
done with the passed argument to see if it is modified, or that we could
try to figure out whether the returned reference is actually used as
such, but that is technically extremely difficult given the way things
work internally. So given the choice between ignoring extremely
suspicious code like this and throwing an error/warning, I'd rather be
told about it and in the edge cases where I really do want the
equivalent of a NOP in my code, it isn't that hard to force it by adding
a dummy storage variable along with a comment explaining why you need to
do that.
-Rasmus
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