Object-Oriented PHP

A Note About Overloading

On the PHP website the __set, __get, and __call methods are referred to as overloaded methods. Within the context of OOP, an overloaded method is one that has the same name as another method of the same class but differs in the number or type of arguments—methods with the same name but a different "signature." Because PHP is a typeless language and doesn't really care how many arguments are passed, this kind of overloading is an impossibility. In PHP, overloading usually refers to methods that perform a variety of different tasks.

Languages such as C++ also support something called operator overloads. For example, a programmer can define what the "greater than" operator means when two objects of the same class are compared. ...