[Powerlord]

Speaking from a "user" (read: plugin coder) perspective...

Honestly, if I had to choose just one of the 3, I'd have to choose #1. The major reason being I'm already used to arrays being references like C and Java. This also adds consistency, as right now Strings appear to be passed by reference to functions; otherwise, Format and friends would break horribly.

#3 introduces a new syntax and it seems to me it would cause a lot of confusion. It's also not clear whether array[*] arrays could be passed to functions expecting array[] and vice versa.