A very edge case in PHP 5.4 regarding passing objects by reference and using reflection.

strange.php

<?php
/**
 * A very edge case in PHP 5.4 regarding passing objects by reference. 
 * It seems to be a compound effect of using reflection to set an inherited method as 'available', 
 * AND that method taking an explicitly referential argument (&argument sig) 
 * AND then invoking it with func_get_args() as opposed to constructing the array of args manually.
 * 
 * No idea why these things all cause this behaviour or if they should.
 * 
 * Important to note that this effect isn't present in PHP 5.5.
 */
class A {
    private function foo(&$arg1) {
        var_dump('arg1: ', $arg1);
    }	
}

class B extends A {
    public function bar() {
        $x = new stdClass();
        $x->baz = 'just a value';
        $this->callPrivate($x);
    }
	
    private function callPrivate($x)
    {
        $method = new \ReflectionMethod(
            'A',
            'foo'
        );
		
        //* for some reason, the private function needs to have been changed to be 'accessible' for this to work in 5.4
        $method->setAccessible(true);

        //working 5.4 (* see above) but not in 5.5
        $arguments = func_get_args();
		
        //not working in either
        $arguments = array($x); // <---- COMMENT THIS LINE TO SEE IT WORK IN PHP 5.4
		
        return $method->invokeArgs($this, $arguments);
    }
}

$y = new B();
$y->bar();