I assume it would be possible technically but might break (at least by issuing E_STRICT) a lot of code if we forced ArrayObject::offsetGet to return a reference.
Think of all the subclasses that extend ArrayObject who currently do not do that? Other than that, returning a ref where it previously didn't can have all kinds of undesirable and hard-to-track consequences. Best, On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 4:27 PM, Mike Willbanks <pen...@gmail.com> wrote: > Looking at: http://lxr.php.net/xref/PHP_5_5/Zend/zend_interfaces.c#538 it > seems that ArrayAccess at the moment can not be returned by a reference. > I'm wondering if there was a technical reason behind this or if it is now > a BC reason? > > Anyhow; I was attempting to dig through the source code a bit more last > night to see why ArrayObject could not overload the function declaration of > offsetGet to force a return by reference aka: function &offsetGet($key)... > which works now for ArrayAccess but not for ArrayObject. I believe it has > to deal with ArrayObject inheriting ArrayAccess? Is there a way to allow > ArrayObject to change the function declaration in this way? My PHP > internals skills are not the best which is the reason for the question. > > Anyhow; justification wise: in userland this leads to a lot of wtf factor. > It really comes down to having to provide our own implementation of > ArrayObject by extending several different areas including ArrayAccess so > that references can be returned so multi-dimensional arrays can be properly > unset aka: > $ar = new ArrayObject(array('foo' => array('bar' => array('baz' => > 'foo')))); > unset($ar['foo']['bar']['baz']); > > Regards, > > Mike > -- Etienne Kneuss http://www.colder.ch
