The Altia memory space allows users to set the value of ANYTHING, because Altia may get events from the API which do not correspond to any object in the model. Thus, there are no checks to make sure the "variable exists" because it is really an open-ended name/value pair system, and up to users to create objects to respond to any signals, if users want them to.
For example, you could run a client exe that sends code to Altia changing the value of "speed" from 0 to 100 and back over and over. If no objects have an animation called "speed" on them, then you will not see anything happen, but if you define an animation called "speed" on an object, it will start moving around with whatever value the code is setting "speed" to at the time.