Cheers Thiago, In fact this was going to be my next question. I think I will report a documentation bug, just because, after all the discussion we had today, I realize that this is quite a common behaviour in other languages, but for somebody new to languages, being them programming or scripting ones, the fact that the $a=0 line doesn't get executed on subsequent calls isn't so obvious. In other words, from the standpoint of someone that is relatively new to the details (at least), the flow is: 'ok, I do appreciate that the engine keeps memory of the value of that variable declared as static after the function ends, but assigning a value to it at the very beginning of the function seems like the next time the function is going to be called, it will assaign that value again and again...and again'. And I guess the manual wants to be as clear as possible, considering that the examples are often 'foo 'and '$a' related :P In other words I think that it is indeed targeted to beginners as wel, isn't it? Thanks for all the valuable info btw. :) In 4/3/08 16:59, Thiago Pojda, thiago.pojda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ha scritto > > > -----Mensagem original----- > De: Svevo Romano [mailto:svevo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] > > Hi there, > > Many thanks for your answer. I've also gone through your > example and it took me 10 minutes to understand how the > operator precedence was working there. > Was expecting 1 on the first call :) > > But this is not the point. You've nailed my question very > preciseley in your first answer: 'the preceding line is only > run on the first call to the function'. > > My only question is (at it is related to the nature of the > online manual): > how do you know it and I don't? This thing is the only logical > explanation to the fact the $a doesn't get initialized again to > 0 in any subsequent call to the function, but it's not written > anywhere in the manual page. And it seems the most important > statement in my opinion, that justifies what I see as an > exception to a normal flow. > > Hope all this makes sense. > Thanks, > S > > > > <me> > You can use http://bugs.php.net/report.php to report a documentation > "bug" and they'll change the docs :) > > Thiago > </me> > > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php