[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
drewbee, can't you make a comparably elegant replica of this approach by either looking at the context of the passed parameter, or by passing a second parameter that describes the type of the first?
For instance. With one of my lookup functions, I accept either the user's login_name or the user_id. It's a simple matter, at the start of the function, to identify if I've got a numeric or an alphanumeric input. If the latter, I do a lookup of user-ID based on login_name, and in both cases I then jump to a (private) function that looks up based on user_id. It's not especially extensible beyond these two cases, without getting into some messy and (long term) dangerous assumptions about data types .. but that leads to the second option I mentioned.
Second parameter, defines the type of the first parameter. Eg.
$user = user_lookup ($id , "id") A simple switch statement could then farm out to dedicated and possibly private functions within your model.
Basically what you're trying to emulate is something a step beyond conventional method overloading (and two steps beyond PHP's interpretation of that feature).
