See 
PublishedAPI for packages intended to be used by Plugin and Contrib authors, or 
browse all packages.
See also 
Developing plugins, 
Developer's Bible, 
Technical Overview
This Prefs-internal class is used to parse * Set and * Local statements
from arbitrary text, and extract settings from meta objects.  It is used
by 
TopicPrefs to parse preference settings from topics.
This class does no validation or duplicate-checking on the settings; it
simply returns the recognized settings in the order it sees them in.
 StaticFunction parse( $topicObject, $prefs ) 
Parse settings from the topic and add them to the preferences in $prefs