PHP5 with old PHP4 code - php

Question

My friend wants me to tweak his website. But I'm getting the errors
Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in C:\xampp\htdocs\toolmanager\toolmanager\index.php on line 7
Fatal error: Cannot re-assign auto-global variable _REQUEST in C:\xampp\htdocs\toolmanager\toolmanager\includes\classloader_platform.php on line 154
when I try to run the code on apache with PHP5. Here's the code:
require("includes/classloader_platform.php");
line 7->$classloader =& NEW classloader('0','30',$_GET,'1');
$classloader->initialize($classloader);
line 154-> function __construct($cache=false,$cache_lifecycle=false,$_REQUEST,$template_parser=false) {
ini_set("memory_limit","200M");
//globalize _REQUEST
$this->_REQUEST=$_REQUEST;
...
I think it's because he wrote it by PHP4 standards so would it be better to switch apache to PHP4 or are there some simple fixes for these errors?

Answer 1

Do not revert to PHP 4. It is old and unsupported.
For "Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference", just remove the &. It's redundant.
$classloader = NEW classloader(...);
For "Fatal error: Cannot re-assign auto-global variable", rename the function argument $_REQUEST to something else such as $REQUEST, then rename the subsequent occurrences of it within the function. You can't have a function argument with the same name as a superglobal.
function __construct($cache=false,$cache_lifecycle=false,$REQUEST,$template_parser=false) {
// ...
$this->_REQUEST=$REQUEST;
// ...