Right, that?s two bugs here... the only proper way I know of to workaround this is to reference them outside, like this:
$x = new A();
$c_x = &$x;

1) neither copying nor referencing works in this case inside the constructor, I remember this as a possibly known issue...

2) re-referencing does not work... I?ve moved that linking process to another method (not constructor)
- both referencing AND copying works *inside* CTest->Reg, but zend fails to recognize that $reg is already a reference, thus it is not visible outside
I think even this is a known issue, not sure


$register_object;

class CTest {
   var $v=9;
   function CTest() { }
   function reg(&$reg) {
   	$reg=$this;
	var_dump($reg); }
}

$myobj= new CTest();
$myobj->reg($register_object);
var_dump($register_object);
$myobj->v= 1;
$register_object->v= 2;
echo 'both should be equal: ', $myobj->v, ' ',
     $register_object->v;

3) possibly related, just realized that this does not work too...

class CTest {
var $v=9;
function &reg() {
return $this; } }


$myobj= new CTest();
$register_object=$myobj->reg();
var_dump($register_object);

From the talk with Andi it seems that there's no way to do the thing you wnt in PHP, because reference is not a pointer, it's a binding between two variables. SO I move it to feature requests.

urgs, that?s a pity - there?s some unexpected behaviour
using references, we should document this unless it?s not
improved...

Fixed in PHP5.