Thanks It's for a templating engine. The user creates the document (a string) which contains interpolated variables placeholders and markup. When the template is rendered, the placeholders must be replaced with the corresponding values from the dict.
The lines in the template are eval-ed and so Julia will look for the variables in the scope. So the vars should be already defined. Yes, ultimately I can force the user to use a dict (or rather a function for a bit of semantic sugar) - which is preferable from a performance perspective, but less pretty end error prone from the user perspective.
