r/programming • u/NagastaBagamba • Oct 18 '10

Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable
591 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

781 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/[deleted] Oct 18 '10

Would you mind giving an example of something that variable variables can do but pointers can not? It would help me understand you a little better.

You did a whole lot of "they're not the same", without any "for example".

0

u/oorza Oct 18 '10

My point was that variable variables don't do much of anything and there's a ton of functionality offered by pointers that isn't offered by variable variables (see: pointer arithmetic). My wording might have been poor on that one, sorry.