What does "&" mean in this case?

I know that it's creating a re开发者_如何学Cference in other cases. But what happens here?

$crawler = &new MyCrawler();

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It creates an instance of MyCrawler and passes the reference for that instance into $crawler. In PHP5 this is assumed so the use of the & is deprecated.

See Object References (the Ampersand).

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That is deprecated per the PHP documentation