Why use strings when doing rules for Form Validation instead of flags

[eluser]ocdcoder[/eluser]
Yea, I imagine its not THAT much of a performance tweak, but if you have any large forms with multiple validation rules (possible for some web apps) then it could be noticeable.

It was part for performance and the other part convention. PHP uses a FLAG system and I've seen other frameworks use object/array parameters (think jQuery). Although I didn't state it, and I guess I should have. I was curious if this was the "CodeIgniter" way to pass multiple parameters as one.

I'm relatively new to CodeIgniter and I want to keep my code, and how I do things, relatively conventional to the framework. Hence my curiosity for something that would seem so minor.