Description:
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NB! I'm not asking for the un-deprecation of call-time pass-by-reference.

The way I understand it, this could previously alter the behavior of a function at call time. I agree that this can make things ugly and I can see the reason for it being deprecated.

However, I would still like to be able to use the & for decorative purposes.

When you see a call to a function without knowing/remembering/looking up the function definition, there's no way of telling whether the call can modify the variable or not.

In most cases, it is simply assumed that parameters are not passed by reference and will have the exact same value after the call. Which can cause problems when they're actually passed by reference.

Currently, to avoid such problems, I often add comments like this:

// $someParameter is passed by reference and may be modified by someMethod()
$someObject->someMethod($someParameter);

It would make things much clearer if it could be called like in the reproduce code, but ONLY if the function actually uses the first parameter by reference.

Reproduce code:
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$someObject->someMethod(&$someParameter);

Expected result:
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If the definition of someMethod() does not use the first parameter by reference, a warning should appear.

Otherwise, the code should execute normally.

Actual result:
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A warning always appears, regardless of how the parameter is used.