PHP might pass objects by reference automatically, but when I need the reference to a variable, I explicitly reference them, to make it more clear to me that I'm using a reference and not the object itself. And yes, this snippet:

would leave you with a fatal error and nothing more (because the object is just being created, it doesn't yet have a reference until the script steps through that line). My implementation doesn't throw any errors/warnings/notices, because the object is referenced correctly and exists in memory at that point.

Thanks for the feedback. So the system will stay

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