I appreciate your input, Dave.
I'm using something like it for private procs of a package under development.
The functionality needs to be a part of ad_proc, because the public designated procs are planned to be repeatedly called via manually coded (typed) tcl files, and so should be as intuitive and convenient as possible.
Since ad_proc understandably doesn't appear to have the feature, it seems the most dynamic way (that doesn't add extra constraints) is to pass the named parameters as a list for these public designated cases:
qf_test \[list -arg1 value -arg2 value -arg3 value \]
or
qf_test $arg_list
Thank you, again,
Torben