functions that don't work with call-time pass-by-reference disabled

There are a few functions that seem to depend on call-time pass-by-reference being enabled. The two that I can think of right now are xml_set_object and fsockopen (and pfsockopen). xml_set_object is particularly icky, since the various xml_set_*_handler functions don't take the array($object, 'method') syntax yet, so there's no way to use an object as your xml handler at this point. I took a look at usort and tried to figure out how it was accepting the array($object, 'method') syntax, but got completely lost. So if someone could either fix xml_set_object, explain the array syntax, or fix the xml_set_*_handler functions, I'd really, really appreciate it. Thanks, -chuck