Description:
------------
Hello,

Maybe this would finally reach someone's heart; as method overloading is really important to Object Oriented, especially now that PHP 7 will support type hinting for primitives.

Imagine a StringBuilder class (which I'm really creating), now a StringBuilder builds a string by appending/prepending a string, any primitive type, another StringBuilder but not an object.

class StringBuilder {

  public function append(StringBuilder $stringBuilder) {
    $this->string += $stringBuilder->toString();
  }

  public function append(string $string) {
    $this->string += $string;
  }

}

This simply can't be achieved right now, and there's really no reason since would be allowed to hint in PHP7.

One "get-around" solution right now is to use __call method to dispatch to distinct methods, this way it appears as if we are using one single method, but really we are using distinct methods. The problem is that 2 methods might have different arguments, so we have to use func_num_args() to distinguish which method to use, followed by a call_user_func_array :

class Foo {
    private function doSomethingWith2Parameters($a, $b) {

    }

    private function doSomethingWith3Parameters($a, $b, $c) {

    }

    public function __call($method, $arguments) {
      if($method == 'doSomething') {
          if(count($arguments) == 2) {
             return call_user_func_array(array($this,'doSomethingWith2Parameters'), $arguments);
          }
          else if(count($arguments) == 3) {
             return call_user_func_array(array($this,'doSomethingWith3Parameters'), $arguments);
          }
      }
   }    
}