PHP's assignment by reference is not working as expected

Question

Why the following

class AClass
{
    public function __construct ()
    {
        $this->prop = \"Hello\";
    }
    public function &get ()
    {
                


        

Answer 1

Consider this piece of code (It's the same as your code, just without everything else):

$value = new stdClass;
$ref = &$value;
$var = "Hello";
$ref = &$var; // this is where you write $ref = &$ref->get();
var_dump($value);

This gives as expected an empty object and not string(5) Hello.

Why?

We're in line 4 overwriting the reference to $value with a reference to $var.

$ref now holds a reference to $var; the value of $value remains unaffected.

What we're not doing

• We don't assign the value of $var to $value.
• We don't assign to $value a reference to $var.

Conclusion

Assigning references to a variable via another referencing variable is just not possible in PHP.