| 1 | | I don't know how much the trade-off is for that, but the PHP manual states the following |
| | 1 | I don't know how much the trade-off is for that, but the PHP manual states the following: |
| | 2 | |
| | 3 | > Returning by reference is useful when you want to use a function to find to which variable a reference should be bound. Do not use return-by-reference to increase performance. The engine will automatically optimize this on its own. Only return references when you have a valid technical reason to do so. |
| | 4 | |
| | 5 | I think in PHP 4 code it was returned by reference for memory reasons. We should not do that any longer because we don't need it. |