2009/12/27 Mike Wacker <mwac...@cornellsun.com>: > PHP's documentation for foreach states that if you iterate by reference > [foreach ($ii as &$i) ...], you should unset $i after the loop. $i still > points to the last element of the array - updating $i or reusing it will > update the last element of the array. > > In short, why doesn't PHP automatically unset $i after the loop? I can't > think of too many cases where you would want to hold on to that reference > after you exit the loop, but I can think of a lot of scenarios where a user > could accidentally tamper the array by using $i in a different context later > on (especially since loop variable names often are reused).
This is a bit of a FAQ, frankly. May I suggest reading this thread from a couple of months ago: http://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=125617546815934&w=2. There are some more discussions both on the list and in the bug tracker if you want to have a bit more of a dig into this. The really, really short version is that it would break backward compatibility to change it now, it's useful in some (admittedly limited) cases, and it's not as though it's not well documented as behaving that way. Adam -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
