This past week I had the need to use overloaded methods in PHP 5. Overloading a method in object oriented design is especially helpful when trying to achieve the same operation while the code needs to be triggered from different states of the application or even different locations of the application. In my case, I needed an overloaded constructor to a PHP class. Yes, constructors are also a bit different in PHP 5 but still workable.
To make a long story short, in PHP 5 there is no real way to overload a method like you can with Java. However, it seems like the developers of PHP 5 did have overloading methods in mind and allowed some form of it. It seems like allowing a real method overloads in PHP would be a special case of what the core developers actually allowed to do. The reason behind the current syntax is beyound me. I even tried to look for a PHP roadmap and see if proper method overloading will be introduced in the future but I could not find anything relevant.
A user with the name Noel has posted on DZone a little snippet of code that shows exactly how method overloading in PHP5 can be achieved.
Do you know of any intentions on including real method overloading in PHP6?
