Variadic functions and type-hinting in PHP

Question

Quick one:

Is there any way to enforce types for variadic functions in PHP? I'm assuming not, however maybe I've missed something.

As of now, I'm just forcing a single required argument of the needed type, and iterating to check the rest.

public function myFunction(MyClass $object){
    foreach(func_get_args() as $object){
        if(!($object instanceof MyClass)){
            // throw exception or something
        }
        $this->_objects[] = $object;
    }
}

Any better solutions?

---

Purpose:

A container object that acts as an iterated list of the child objects, with some utility functions. calling it with a variadic constructor would be something like this:

// returned directly from include
return new MyParent(
    new MyChild($params),
    new MyChild($params),
    new MyChild($params)
);

The other option could be an addChild method chain:

$parent = new MyParent;
return $parent
    ->addChild(new MyChild($params))
    ->addChild(new MyChild($params))
    ->addChild(new MyChild($params));

The children take several arguments to their constructor as well, so I'm trying to balance between legibility and processing expense.

Answer 1

This is now possible with PHP 5.6.x, using the ... operator (also known as splat operator in some languages):

Example:

function addDateIntervalsToDateTime( DateTime $dt, DateInterval ...$intervals )
{
    foreach ( $intervals as $interval ) {
        $dt->add( $interval );
    }
    return $dt;
}