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

Writing dispatchers. Twisted uses python's reflective capabilities to dispatch XML-RPC and SOAP calls. RMI uses Java's reflection api for dispatch.

Command line parsing. Building up a config object based on the command line parameters that are passed in.

When writing unit tests, it can be helpful to use reflection, though mostly I've used this to bypass access modifiers (Java).