Whenever reflection can be avoided, it should be. What makes it icky is that developers then need to worry about how they name their variables. It shouldn't b

Whenever reflection can be avoided, it should be. What makes it icky is that developers then need to worry about how they name their variables. It shouldn't be a problem so long there's a convention established. Personally, when passing a lot of parameters, I condense them into a "Holder" class: $holder->var1 = "foo"; $holder->var2 = "foo"; //or set from array $holder->addArray(array("var1"=>"foo", "var2"=>"foo")); //later on, retrieving values $holder->useStrictMode(true); //optional: throws exception if key isn't present (rather than returning null) echo $holder->var1; echo $holder->var2; echo $holder->var3; //throws exception that var3 was expected to be present It's worked well for me. It's also very handy for returning multiple values and status codes.