> Yermo,
>
> Essentially, what Andi was saying is that we need your help in order for
> us to help you.  To put it more clearly - even if there is a bug in the
> language engine or some other component of PHP - it's impossible for us to
> figure out what it is, unless we're provided with a reproducible test case
> that's small enough to analyze.

yea, like I was saying there are so often cases with PHP that you have a
very specific situation where it's dumping core and you make the
/slightest/ change and it no longer exhibits the problem .. only to crop
up again months later in another very annoying/very specific instance.

In the most extreme case I've seen removing a single character from a
string in an array be the difference between symbol table
corruption/coredump and running fine.

What I'm hearing is that unless I can reproduce it in a small script I
should not bother reporting it. Correct?

>>Maybe there should be a "What to do when you can't reproduce it in a few
>>lines of code" page to help guys like me out.
>
> That's not a bad idea!

It turns out that, at least in this instance, the source of my problem was
incorrectly using parentheses on return()'s when returning references. If
I understand correctly ()'s indicate an expression in this context and
expressions cannot evaluate to references ... what's weird is that I've
been doing it that way for the last 4 years with little ill effect.

It does look like the situation is not being caught correctly, however, as
returning a reference in a parenthetical expression will, under some
circumstances, cause a coredump. I believe because PHP doesn't handle the
"trying to dereference a NULL pointer as an object reference" case
sometimes. (again, random core dump. I don't have a demo script.)

Just an FYI.

Thanks for your time and attention,

-- Yermo

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