In versions of PHP before 5, constructors were functions with the same name as their class. PHP 5 introduced the __construct() unified name, and has deprecated the old style in PHP 7. Cogneato still has code remnants from long ago, with the old style. I recently worked on improving the compatibility of our old code with PHP 7. To remove deprecation warnings, I switched all of the old style constructors that I could find in our CMS code to the new style. There were still many places calling these methods though, mainly where you would now call parent::__construct(). To safely handle the risk that I missed fixing any or that client code still has such calls, I made a fallback using __call(). It looks something like:
class ParentClass{
public function __call($method, $args){
if(isset($this)){
if($this instanceof $method && is_callable(Array($this, $method . '::__construct'))){
return call_user_func_array(Array($this, $method . '::__construct'), $args);
}
}
$trace = debug_backtrace();
$trace = array_shift($trace);
throw new \Error("Call to undefined method " . get_class($this) . "::{$method}() from {$trace['file']}:{$trace['line']}");
}
}
This should safely call the correct parent method if it exists, and for other undefined methods, throw a reasonable exception.