I'm actually surprised this doesn't come up more often. Considering how popular syntax highlighting is, it would be neat to be able to color stuff based on context. I guess it would be some sort of bizarre unicode monster that encoded the glyph as well as color?

Regardless, I was sad about that as well. You just can't appreciate the MRDV properly without it. [1] Or without the ensuing War & Peace-sized volumes of comic/chatlog either, I guess.

[1] http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mspaintadventures/images...

Another idea that's not supported is the pathological way function scope is interpreted. The two dang functions in the MRDV flow past each other, like a case fall-through [2], but for function scopes. It makes sense artistically in the comic, but I'm not super clear on what it would even mean in terms of a real program.

[2] Only Duff's Device comes to mind here, but I think we're looking at something more pathological with the MRDV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device