www.greg-wright.co.uk

The lack of proper class method overloading as found in other languages like Java and C# is holding back PHP's development as a first class language and leading to very clunky code. Here is an example based on Zend Framework 2's Zend\Tag\Item class:

   public function __construct($options)
    {
        if ($options instanceof \Zend\Config\Config) {
            $options = $options->toArray();
        }

        if (!is_array($options)) {
            throw new Exception\InvalidArgumentException('Invalid options provided to constructor');
        }
       $this->setOptions($options);
    }

And here is how it should look:

   public function __construct(\Zend\Config\Config $options)
   {
      $this->__construct($options->toArray());
   }

   public function __construct(array $options)
   {
      $this->setOptions($options);
   }

The latter is so much more elegant but sadly it is not going to work in PHP any time soon. The real question is why?