Posted by Michael Fesser on 09/24/07 23:38

..oO(gosha bine)

>Michael Fesser wrote:
>>
>> No! References have their uses, even in PHP5. You don't need them for
>> objects anymore, but in many other cases they can still be necessary.
>
>I can't think of any situation where references would be necessary or at
>least useful. Would you care to provide some examples?

Let's say I have a structure of nested arrays, like a tree. For
convenience reasons I want to access a particular element just by giving
the "path" to it, like "first level/second level/third level". Now the
access function has to tokenize the string and walk down the array tree.

If I would just want to read the value of a particular element, I would
not need any references at all, copies would be fine. But if I want to
change the value, it has to be done in the original array. So the access
function has to keep track of where it actually is in the array - it
always has to point to the current element while walking down the tree.

Micha

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