On a related note, I have to admit that at times I enjoy the agony of
debugging my own code, but are there any plans for providing more
sophisticated debugging procedures for Labtalk?

In addition to the System Variables listed in section 2.9 of the LabTalk manual,
the following System and Reserved variables should be avoided in user-defined
scripts.

System Variables
----------------------------
i,j,k
x,y,z,t
X1,X2,X3,X4
Y1,Y2,Y3,Y4
Z1,X2,Z3,Z4
V0,V1,V2,V3,etc.

Operation Variables
----------------------------
xx,yy,zz,tt
ii,jj,kk
temp,e,tiny
beg,begin,start,startRow,
end,endRow,endRows,numRows

Notes:
----------------------------
'System Variables' have a specific meaning in Origin;
for example, X1, X2 define the endpoints of the x-axis.

'Operation Variables' are variables which are used in scripts called
by Origin during various operations. User-defined scripts may also use
these variables, but there is no guarentee that the variable will remain
un-changed if an Origin operation is performed (like Fit:Linear).