Re: Concept: constructor overloading syntax sugar

Hi Am 2025-02-18 09:00, schrieb Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]:

Personally, I think quite the opposite: named constructors make a lot more sense than type-based overloads. For instance, you might have both createFromJson and createFromYaml; their inputs are both going to be "string" as far as the type system is concerned, so overloading would be useless.

To add an example from PHP’s standard library: The new DOM API shipped in PHP 8.4 uses named constructors to create documents and requires this to distinguish between createFromFile and createFromString. https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/da38477544c76c2f034ad74dfd2e1fe613030a31/ext/dom/php_dom.stub.php#L2041-L2045

    final class HTMLDocument extends Document
    {
        public static function createEmpty(string $encoding = "UTF-8"): HTMLDocument {}

        public static function createFromFile(string $path, int $options = 0, ?string $overrideEncoding = null): HTMLDocument {}

        public static function createFromString(string $source, int $options = 0, ?string $overrideEncoding = null): HTMLDocument {}

        // […]
    }

Best regards Tim Düsterhus