Re: new overloading feature?

Why not using Singleton for multiple objects with getInstance() ? Andrey Derrell.Lipman@UnwiredUniverse.com wrote:

I came across an interesting desire today. I'd like to create a new class instance if an only if a "key" value does not already exist. This key value could be looked up in a database, in an array, etc. The following contrived example shows use of a proposed __new() overload function which would be called BEFORE the constructor, and could chose to return a newly constructed object (by calling __construct()) or to return an already existing object. One could certainly call a function which searched for the key value and only instantiated a new object if the existing one was not found, but this seems cleaner. Thoughts? <?php class X {

    static          $allX = array();
    var             $val;

    function __construct($val)
    {
        $this->val = $val;
        X::$allX[] =& $this;
    }

    function __new($val)
    {
        foreach (X::$allX as $x)
        {
            if ($x->val == $val)
            {
                return $x;
            }
        }

        return __construct($val);
    }

}

$try1 = new X(23);              /* would return $allX[0] reference */
$try2 = new X(42);              /* woudl return $allX[1] reference */
$try3 = new X(23);              /* would return $allX[0] reference */

?>