In a brief new post, Mike Wallner talks about some of the discussion surrounding overloaded array properties lately and something he's discovered about it.

As arrays are the only complex types that are passed by value (resources don't really count here) the solution to described problem is simple: use an object; either an instance of stdClass or ArrayObject will do well, depending if you want to use array index notation.

He includes two code examples, one just trying to overload it in a class with __get (yielding an error) and the other using the constructor to pass an ArrayObject out first, allowing for error-free assignment.