Use-cases for reflection

Question

Recently I was talking to a co-worker about C++ and lamented that there was no way to take a string with the name of a class field and extract the field with that name; in o

Answer 1

I'm in a situation now where I have a stream of XML coming in over the wire and I need to instantiate an Entity object that will populate itself from elements in the stream. It's easier to use reflection to figure out which Entity object can handle which XML element than to write a gigantic, maintenance-nightmare conditional statement. There's clearly a dependency between the XML schema and how I structure and name my objects, but I control both so it's not a big problem.