Question

After taking a look at some old code:

//Nothing like a destructor!!
function destroy() {
    settype(&$this, 'null');
}

And called by

$Cache->destroy();

However in PHP 5.3 I get
Deprecated: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated in /blah/-cache-.php on line 154

How should I do this?

Answer 1

Your immediate problem can be met by removing the & in $this, but the whole construction doesn’t make sense to me. If it’s not plain invalid to destroy $this from within the object’s context, it’s definitely not good practice.

To destroy an object, a simple

unset($Cache);

will do.

If one wants to execute stuff when the object is destroyed, one should define a destructor in the class. (The comment in your destroy() code says that this is not the point here, though. 🙂