Are PHP5 objects passed by reference?

Question

I can\'t seem to get any consistent info on this. Different sources appear to say different things and the venerable php.net itself (appears) not to explicitly stat

Answer 1

From the PHP manual:

You can pass a variable by reference to a function so the function can modify the variable. The syntax is as follows:

Note: There is no reference sign on a function call - only on function definitions. Function definitions alone are enough to correctly pass the argument by reference. As of PHP 5.3.0, you will get a warning saying that "call-time pass-by-reference" is deprecated when you use & in foo(&$a);.

And from What's New in PHP5:

In PHP 5, the infrastructure of the object model was rewritten to work with object handles. Unless you explicitly clone an object by using the clone keyword you will never create behind the scene duplicates of your objects. In PHP 5, there is neither a need to pass objects by reference nor assigning them by reference

So therefore the only time you need to use the function foo(&$var) syntax is if $var might not be an instance of a class.