note 83252 deleted from language.oop5.decon by cmb

Note Submitter: KK ---- I ran into an interesting (and subtle) code error while porting some code to PHP 5.2.5 from PHP 4.4.8 that I think illustrates a noteworthy semantic. I have a hierarchy of classes with both styles of constructors but where one in the middle was missing the __construct() function (it just had the old-style one that called the (nonexistent) __construct()). It worked fine in PHP4 but caused an endless loop (and stack overflow) in PHP5. I believe what happened is that in PHP4 the old-style constructor was not called, but in PHP5 it was (due to the "emulation" of PHP4), and since _construct() wasn't defined for that class, the call to $this->__construct() caused a looping call to the original (lowest child) constructor.