memory addresses

 

https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.references.whatare.php

What References Are

References in PHP are a means to access the same variable content by different names. They are not like C pointers; for instance, you cannot perform pointer arithmetic using them, they are not actual memory addresses, and so on. See What References Are Not for more information. Instead, they are symbol table aliases. Note that in PHP, variable name and variable content are different, so the same content can have different names. The closest analogy is with Unix filenames and files - variable names are directory entries, while variable content is the file itself. References can be likened to hardlinking in Unix filesystem.

在 PHP 中引用意味着用不同的名字访问同一个变量内容。这并不像 C    的指针：例如你不能对他们做指针运算，他们并不是实际的内存地址......    查看引用不是什么了解更多信息。   替代的是，引用是符号表别名。注意在PHP 中，变量名和变量内容是不一样的，   因此同样的内容可以有不同的名字。最接近的比喻是    Unix 的文件名和文件本身——变量名是目录条目，而变量内容则是文件本身。引用可以被看作是    Unix 文件系统中的硬链接。