yohgaki at hotmail dot com (2001-04-14 02:48:18)
PHP manages freeing all resources. Users does not required to free file handle resource, database resources, memory, etc, unless programmer need to free resource during script execution.
(All resources are released after script execution)
PHP4 also have reference count feature. For example, memory for variables is shared when it assigned to other variable. If contents has been changed, PHP4 allocate new memory for it.
For example, programmer does not have to use pass by reference for large parameters for better performance with PHP4.
It would be a nice section for new PHP users, if there is "Resource Handling" section or like. Explanation about reference count feature in PHP4 would be very helpful to write better PHP4 scripts also.