[thelist] PHP syntax problem

[Andrew Forsberg]

On Wed, 2002-04-17 at 12:03, Andy Warwick wrote:

> But I can't for the life of me work out why the class is being called in that
> way, and what benefits it creates. AFAICT it's something to do with copying
> objects, saving memory and the $this variable, but I can't find an easy example
> of why it's needed.

Hi Andy,

When an instance of the Customer class is created you want one object
referred to via $customer, not two objects. So:

$customer =& new CustomerClass();

Tells CustomerClass to build a new customer object, and set $customer to
refer to it. Without the & you'll have two separate objects floating
about: the one created by CustomerClass, and the one copied to
$customer.

So much for the theory -- in practise I can't seem to get php to do
anything of the sort if there's no &. Unless the garbage collector is
incredibly efficient and destroying objects which can't be addressed as
soon as they're generated, I'm not quite sure what's happening.

Cheers
Andrew