I've been looking through idiorm, which is used in a project that I'm working on and I keep seeing parameters be given a value. I'm somewhat familiar with this being done in python where you can set default values for parameters, not sure if that's what happening here though.
Example:
public static function for_table($table_name, $connection_name = self::DEFAULT_CONNECTION) {
self::_setup_db($connection_name);
return new self($table_name, array(), $connection_name);
}