PHP/Joomla When to use references

Answer 1

You shouldn't need to assign by reference. The issue is that Joomla 1.5 is designed to work with both PHP 4 and 5. Joomla 1.6 is designed to be PHP 5 only, so there's a good chance that this will go away later.

So yes, if it works for you without assigning by reference, you can leave it that way.

And if you'd like to read more (probably far more than you wanted to know) about references in PHP, I'd highly recommend this article: http://blog.libssh2.org/index.php?/archives/51-Youre-being-lied-to..html