I believe i've found a contradiction in the manual (this can be found in the online manual).

This is what it says in the documentation for the require function:
"require() and include() are identical in every way except how they handle failure."


And Now quoting from:
Appendix b: Migrating from PHP 3 to PHP 4
Sub-section: Parser behavior

"Another thing no longer possible, though rarely seen in PHP 3 code is returning values from a required file. Returning a value from an included file is still possible."


There'a  fair chance i'm mis-understanding the meaning of 'required' and 'included' files, as refered to in the 'parser behaviour' quote, however what appears to be the case is that it's saying that it's possible to use the

return
feature from included files, but not from require files.
After a small amount of testing i can see that both the 'require' and 'include' functions are able to return things to a calling script.

So the 'parser behaviour' section is either inacurate, or unclear.