The full question should be "Is this correct or is it some bug I can't count on?"

I've been working with PDO more and in particular playing with fetching data directly into objects. While doing so I discovered this:

If I fetch data directly into an object like this:

$STH = $DBH->prepare('SELECT first_name, address from people WHERE 1');
$obj = $STH->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_CLASS, 'person');

and have an object like this:

class person {
  public $first_name;
  public $address;

  function __construct() {
    $this->first_name = $this->first_name . " is the name";
  }
}

It shows me that the properties are being assigned before the __construct is being called -- because the names all have " is the name" appended.

Is this some bug (in which case I can't/won't count on it) or is this The Way It Should Be. Because it's really quite a nice thing the way it works currently.