Developer Annoyance #1

[Arthur Urban]

I think a new syntax needs to be made available for calling functions 
outside the message hierarchy. The existing mechanism does not lend 
itself to high readability or maintainability. Consider the following, 
if you will:

  put 1 into varA
  put 2 into varB
  put value( merge("calc([[varA]],[[varB]]))", btn "source" ) into 
localResult

further, if I need to protect the integrity of the variable passed it 
begins to look like this:

  put "1,2,3" into varA
  put 4 into varB
  put value( merge("calc([[quote&varA&quote]],[[varB]]))", btn "source" 
) into localResult

I'm not sure that this is the right direction for any language to be 
headed. Please explain why we can't have the following syntax:

  put calc(varA,varB) of btn "source" into localResult