Not sure what $- is meant to do in your short comment on it...?
Well, like $nick $+ $chan would return XTZGZoReX#somechan, you could have $- seperate stuff instead of putting it together, ie:
echo $-(sometext,5) could return "somet ext".
I agree with you about the concept of using other peoples' scripts. We can't just ignore people, true enough.
Anyway, to get back to the compatibility thing (which I think we forgot):
As jaytea just said, even /timer could cause confusion. Say, someone makes an alias called /timername (for whatever crazy reason) and calls it, and doesn't understand what's going on when a timer starts popping up. There, we already have the problem. Of course, making the problem worse isn't good.
However, I came to think of something. Special aliases like these could be called in a special way. That being, _aliasname, -aliasname ... or something like that. Then, if you wanted to silence it; _.aliasname. Then, if the alias is called with just /aliasname or .aliasname, it would parse the normal alias, not the wildcard one.
In that sense, it could be possible without causing great troubles.
