That's pretty much the same thing you can see with foreach, the array should not be altered while looping (the array itself, the data of a given element can be altered). No bug here, but should be documented.

Why document an obvious bug instead of fixing it? How would you document/explain this?

If this works:

    function ret($array) {return $array;}
    $b = array('foo','bar');
    list($a,$b) = ret($b);

But this doesn't:

    function &ret(&$array) {return $array;}
    $b = array('foo','bar');
    list($a,$b) = ret($b);

Then there's a referencing error hidden somewhere...

Can this either be classfied as a scripting engine bug. If it indeed is a documentation issue then re-classify this as a "To be Documented" documentation issue for the developer that picks this one up.

The order in which the variables are picked up in this case is "undefined behavior" - both variables are needed during the "list" operation.

Hate to be nagging again, but there's still a problem: it works "as it's supposed to" (read: "as it's not documented") in PHP4, but doesn't in PHP5 with the exception, that the following produces expected results:

$a = array('Foo','Bar');
list($a,$b) = $a;

$a == 'Foo'  ==>  TRUE
$b == 'Bar'  ==>  TRUE

"both variables are needed during the "list" operation." is a somewhat confusing statement regarding the issue(s) above.

Like Johannes said and Pierre said, writing to a variable you are iterating over 
gives undefined behaviour.  That means it will work in some cases and not in 
others and may very well change between versions.  There is nothing to fix here 
except perhaps a little note in the documentation.

This bug has been fixed in the documentation's XML sources. Since the
online and downloadable versions of the documentation need some time
to get updated, we would like to ask you to be a bit patient.

Thank you for the report, and for helping us make our documentation better.