a word of warning to others - passing variables by reference

[lawrence]

Those of you with backgrounds with the C language will laugh at my
mistake, but those of you, like myself, who deal mostly with PHP
should be warned about passing variables as references - debugging
then requires a whole new mindset. I've a cms written in procedural
style that I've been converting to OOP. It is important to always pass
objects by reference. Unthinkingly, writing the constructors, I also
passed my config array by reference. This meant that everything that
happened inside those objects now effected the config array in global
space.

Working in PHP you get used to certain things - especially the fact
that all variables are passed as copies, and that when an array is
copied it is automatically reset. Having just lost 12 hours trying to
debug this, I warn you all. If you've got global variables changing
seemingly without any reason for them to, ask yourself if you've
passed anything be reference.