I'm also being compelled to say that I really don't understand what you meant when you said "This is the exact point of my mediation." Spiritway understands that messing with $[ is dangerous and not to be trifled with. The majority of your meditation, as I understand it, attempts to argue that $[ is something that, as a community, we should accept the use of and possibly even encourage people to mess with.

If you want to play with it, understand it, find some cool obfuscations, or even find an interesting (non-production) use for it, fine; we all encourage expeditions into deeper understanding.

But, the ability to mess with $[ should now be considered to be a failed experiment, just like pseudohashes. There were reasons that they were tried, but over time they've been found to cause more problems than they are worth. That is the important thing to understand; a group of intelligent, thoughtful people are not going to arbitrarily turn their back on anything that proves to be worthwhile. Messing with $[ isn't worthwhile. Strong arguments attempting to say they are, will always result in -- votes.

I realize simply posting this further extends the life and add to the possibility that this thread will continue, when it really should just die. I understand losing XP hurts, sorry, take the lumps, eventually you'll learn from them. I don't need an answer, don't really want an answer; if you feel you must give one, send it as a /msg to me. Otherwise, you're likely to lose more XP.

-Scott