Thanks Fabio, but I'm not sure this will work for me. What exactly is happening is that if the array passed in causes a too many variables error, we are creating another instance of the object and recalling the same method, thus why I would need to specifically know if the parameter was passed by reference. This is poorly designed and we are seriously thinking about rewritting this, but if time is an issue, we need another solution that knows for sure if this was passed by reference.