I've written a controller that doubles as something resembling a RESTful API to handle AJAX requests. I'd like to have this controller have a "list" action to return a JSON array of data objects (e.g. a script does a GET request to "<root url>/product/list" and gets back an array of products in JSON), but I come to find that "list" is a reserved word in PHP so I can't seem to create a method with that name. Is there some sort of workaround or should I think of a different name for the action?

You can't use list as a method name. But you can use $url_handlers to map a action name to a specific method.

private static $url_handlers = array(
	'list//$ID/$OtherID' => 'items',
);
private static $allowed_actions = array(
	'items',
);

public function items() {
	return 'list';
}