Just so my silence isn't misinterpreted as consent,
I strongly disagree with Nigel, and agree with Ned,
on this one.
You're introducing mechanisms commonly found in
object-oriented languages into something that hardly
has variables. Don't do that.
Keep it simple. Not everything in the world needs to be
scoped, access-controlled, typed, prefixed, and placed
in a name space. Yes, it would make sense, if this
were a really big language, where variables somehow
are the main system interface. But it isn't, and
it (in my opinion) shouldn't be.
By the way, I still haven't seen a reason why the
message flags extension needs to be so complicated, and
why we otherwise need to manipulate lists of strings.
(Alexey described that he doesn't want to have to
keep track of what flags exist, but I still haven't
seen what his users actually _do_ with all those
flags that they don't want to keep track of.)
Jutta