creating reference via script

What is the code/script equivalent of dragging an item to a slot in screen view?
For example, we can manually set to use gravity for a rigidbody, but we also can set this in code:

rigidbody.useGravity = true;

We can create a GameObject in our script and then drag and drop myItem to the new slot manually in the scene view. I would like to ask you how to code this “drag&drop”.

===edited on 13. march 2014 ===== here goes:
I have about 20 spell prefabs in my “spells” folder.

This is my variable to which I can assign one of my 20 prefabs from assets, in order to play a specific animation.

public GameObject _spell;

I would like to assign via script a certain animation. For example, if my player picks up a “spell_Fire” PickUp, I would like Unity to dynamically assign the fire animation prefab to my _spell variable.

I’m not really sure what you mean with “dragging an item to a slot”
But there are two “slots” I can think of.

Either you have an unassigned object

public GameObject MyObject

this will show up as
MyObject [None (GameObject)] in the inspector.

To assign an object to this variable, you just have to do normal variable assigning

void Awake()
{ this.MyObject = GameObject.Find("ObjectToAssign"); }

The second “slot” I can think of is if you want to assign a component to your object.
Adding a rigidbody, box collider or a script.

To do this you use the AddComponent-function.

gameObject.AddComponent<BoxCollider>();

To elaborate on the solution I used, first I created an abstract class that inherits MonoBehaviour for all my types. (Hull, Engine, etc.). Within the abstract class I specified the sub-components (both a GameObject for the mesh and a Transform for the mount point) and a method to add a new one. All my meshes are in Resources folders and I simply initialize them using the Resources.Load() method, and pass the name. From each GameObject I can get the script by saying Hull.engine.GetComponent(typeof(Engine)) or build a property that accesses it for compact code.

I was able to assemble many components using this, they are modular, but each one needs an script that inherits from the abstract class in order to specify the mount points. I suppose I could tag the mount points and find them dynamically but this works just as well.