I admire your enthusiasm. I'd rather just have the easy life and use the documented format than argue that the undocumented format should work
I will continue to use = until the help file says we shouldn't, which will be until the end of time given Khaled's tenacity for not wanting to break existing scripts with mIRC updates. That might be why he hasn't fixed this issue, in case it breaks existing scripts that rely on the quirky behaviour.
I have to say though that although you have highlighted a bug, I don't think it is one that most people will encounter. I can't think of any situation where you would want to dynamically name a local variable.
