$highlight should have a second parameter, $highlight(N/text,n) where n makes sure the first parameter specified is a number with the purpose to retrieve a highlight, without n specified the first parameter would be a text...
you also should be able to specify if the text you put in is the nick, because highlighting can be done on nicks but there is no good way to check on it without using a huge script to first retrieve all options of a $highlight and manually comparing...
there are also
a few bugs in $highlight you should be aware off...
I think $highlight needs a good work over!
there have been a few suggestions for improvements already (among which one of mine for regexp support)
