SitePoint Blogs : Dynamically Typed: configuration with arrays smells bad.
I have been guilty of this in the past, just because I didn't know of another method. And it is indeed annoying to maintain. Harry provides two alternatives, including the parse_ini_file() function that I didn't know about. It lets you put configuration stuff in a classic .ini file, and then parses it into variables for you, fast. Nice!
# Feb 20, 2004