As I was filling out a bug report, I realized why (speculation here) the constructor is final: so that functions like simplexml_load_file and simplexml_load_string can work. I imagine the PHP-ized code looks something like
<?php
function simplexml_load_file($filename, $class_name = "SimpleXMLElement", $options = 0, $ns = "", $is_prefix = false) {
return new $class_name($filename, $options, true, $ns, $is_prefix);
}
?>
If we were to use a different $class_name and change the constructor's definition these functions wouldn't work.
There's no easy, sensible solution that keeps simplexml_load_file and simplexml_load_string.
