You're advocating a workaround to allow someone to name a private method the same as a public one.

Not necessarily. It may be the other way around. The parent may add the public method after the private method was created by the subclasser. Indeed, if the parent class' author and child class' author are different persons, the latter is doing a risky task to begin with. But regardless, if someone's using the subclass and want to use this new shiny method, the naive croak()ing implementation may needlessly break code that would otherwise work.

lodin