On 02.09.2018 at 22:15, Jeffry Killen wrote: > I have been trying to get a better understanding of "singleton". > > It is defined as a class that can only produce one instance of > itself. > > In the online explanation, that is accomplished by a > private constructor function that produces an instance > of the class within its instance. > > But in php I am of the understanding that a constructor > function has to be made public and can't return anything. > > Here is the online reference I am looking at: > https://www.techopedia.com/definition/15830/singleton > > So, at some point it seems that the class instance has to > be exported via a return statement at some point, otherwise > how would it be used in other code? > > Is there a part of the manual that addresses this? There has been a manual page about OOP design patterns[1], but it has been removed from the PHP manual (IMO, rightly so, since this is out of scope). Nonetheless, the part about singletons might still be worth reading. [1] <http://svn.php.net/viewvc/phpdoc/en/trunk/language/oop5/patterns.xml?revision=313136&view=markup&pathrev=331456> -- Christoph M. Becker
