Hi all,

Following a long and fairly embarrassing exchange of views with one of my 
php|architect authors, I finally discovered that 
allow_call_time_pass_reference is still on by default in PHP_5_3 (d'oh). 
This makes no sense to me because:

- it throws an E_DEPRECATED warning, which nobody will see during 
development because
- it's a PHP_INI_SYSTEM|PHP_INI_PERDIR setting that is switched on by 
default and
- on production sites, where it should be switched off, E_DEPRECATED is 
fairly likely to go unreported
- we've been advising people to switch it off for over 8 years

Does anyone have a good reason for keeping it switched on by default in PHP 
5.3? Like, would switching it off by default break a lot of existing code, 
given that most users are a bit beyond PHP 3 now?

If not, there's a trivial patch attached for main.c and both php.ini-* 
files.

As an aside, by-ref is actually faster than by-value under Windows in my 
tests, for small amounts of data. That was what you might call an unexpected 
result - it definitely isn't the case under *nix, or with very large arrays.

- Steph