Quoting chiaro scuro <kiaroskuro@[...].com> :

>  I understand that it has been implemented statically, and that
>  the whole mechanism would need changing, but don't you agree that
>  this syntactic tagging and static interpretation of '=' is a kind
>  of defensive programming that we could do well without?

It's not a matter of being defensive... because variables and method
names are gramatically different, there are some constructs where
one is (gramatically) valid but not the other.  The decision has to
be made up-front, or the grammar drastically revised.

-mental