Graham tiaxgame No that will not work because expressions inside ( and ) are evaluated its not a bug
it is just the way that xtscript works and cannot be changed
if you wish to represent ( and ) in a variable they MUST be escaped or replaced by entities
ie
var $data=(8-2)
var $data=\(8-2\)
There is no other choice unless you use print_raw
print_raw (8-2)
will output (8-2) as nothing is evaluated