Just starting into the world of OOP

[PHP John]

In PHP is it acceptable to overload a class contructor?

Does PHP have "private, protected, and public" designators for class methods and variables, or is any variable/method accessable from outside the object?

[Jeff Lange]

PHP4 considers every method and variable public (PHP5 does not).

in PHP, there is no overloading, so I don't know if that is possible. (You can have optional arguments, or do a count of the args provided to the method, and the like, but there is no real overloading)

[PHP John]

So, basically, I could set up a class constructor to acccept an array of arguments and then test for values in the array, and any needed value not passed in with the array I would then have a default value ready to assign.

Have I got that right?

[Jeff Lange]

That's one way to do it for sure.

another is like this:

class testClass
{
    function testClass()
    {
        $numargs = func_num_args();
        echo "Number of arguments: $numargs<br>\n";
        if ($numargs >= 2)
        {
            echo "Second argument is: " . func_get_arg (1) . "<br>\n";
        }
    }
} 

[Jeff Lange]

func_get_args() 

just looked that up too, it gives you an array of every argument given to a function.

[coo_t2]

I think there's at 3 reasons why having method overloading isn't really needed.

1. PHP is loosely typed.
2. Functions/methods can have default values.
3. Functions/methods can have variable length
parameter lists via the func_get_args() function.

In PHP 4 when people needed to simulate method overloading you seen
them use func_get_args() a lot to decide which version of the method to call. I suppose you'll still see this done in PHP 5 from time to time.

--ed

[PHP John]

Hmm... Great! Thanks!