I am absolutely certain that you are correct. I have never programmed in PHP so I was confused trying to understand exactly what was meant by references in the

I am absolutely certain that you are correct. I have never programmed in PHP so I was confused trying to understand exactly what was meant by references in the stack overflow question. I was struck by how every discussion of the topic was completely imprecise. There was no clear explanation of references and their relationship with variables and how they differ from what are usually called 'pointers' that clearly distinguished PHP's view of variables from every other object oriented programming language that primarily used reference semantics for objects. It was only in the context of a discussion of how zvals work and the is_ref and the refcount fields that I could understand exactly what semantics were being used by PHP.