David Otton has a new neat PHP trick posted today - assigning references to global values.

What follows isn't so much a PHP trick as a fix for something that really should work, but doesn't. Although the manual implies that the behaviour described below is specific to Zend Engine 1, all my tests were performed against Zend Engine 2.2, PHP 5.2.5.

His example compares making a new stdClass both with and without a reference on the it and var_dumps out the result. The method with the reference fails silently, however and isn't able to correctly assign it to the global. He recommends a work-around though - setting it directly to the $GLOBALS superglobal.