I am having trouble assigning new objects returned from a method called with the :: operator.  

Here is the code that I am running.

// PEAR mail object
require_once ('Mail.php'); 
require_once ('Mail/sendmail.php');

// the function that i am running
function send_notification ($intraval) {

 // Create the mail object using the Mail::factory method for send mail
 $params['sendmail_path']='/usr/lib/sendmail';

 echo 'Test 1 ' . (Mail::factory('sendmail',$params));
 echo '<br >Test 2 ' . ($bla?= Mail::factory('sendmail',$params));
 echo '<br >Test 3 ' . ($bla);
 echo '<br>Test 4 ' . $GLOBALS['bla'];

 // try creating the obj without the :: operator
 $send_mail = new Mail_sendmail ($params);
 echo '<br >Test 5 ' . $send_mail;
}

// attempt to run my function
send_notification (1);

It outputs This:

Test 1 Object
Test 2 Object
Test 3 
Test 4 
Test 5 Object

You can see that when I echo the results returned from the Mail::factory method in test 1 and 2 I get an object.  However, when I attempt to echo the variable assigned from Mail::factory--tests 3 and 4--i get nothing.  In test 5 i created an object using 'new' and it is assigned just fine. 

I don't know if this is really a bug but I don't know at this point what else it could be.


Complied Modules:
'./configure' '--with-gd' '--with-pgsql=/usr/local/pgsql/' '--with-ldap' '--prefix=/usr/local/apache/php' '--with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs' '--with-zlib-dir=/usr/lib' '--with-config-file=/usr/local/apache/lib/' 


On a side note I was searching for bugs with '::' and the search removed '::' from my search.  I don't know if it is possible to allow '::' as a search string but it was quite a bit harder to find similar bugs when the main condition I was trying to match was removed