Question

Does php differentiate them or should I use different names? This is wrong in oop but maybe php is very user friendly.

Answer 1

You can only access object properties using the $this->property syntax. They are not aliased or appear in the local scope. Thus PHP cannot confuse a function parameter with an object variable. Two different notations.

 public function whatever($parameter) {

      $parameter != $this->parameter;

 }