A question on syntax shortcuts

["Barnhill, William" <barnhill_william@bah.com>]

With some of the stuff I am working on I am running into an abundance of
parens. The paren shortcut allowing stuff like
=bill.barnhill+tag1 was a big help. I still am collecting parens a bit
though as many of the cross-refs I'm using are of the form a*(b/c),
which I can't shorten to a*b/c.

An example of this is the following XRI for XDI path language (XPL,
something I'm working for submission to XRI/XDI but it's not cooked
enough for submission yet) that represents the statement "Give me all
articles tagged with the itag I input by the author with the iname I
input that were published in the month of Nov 2006:
($var/+iname/1)/+article/+($var/+itag/2)+($cond/+gt/($date/2006-11-01))+
($cond/+lt/($date/2006-12-01))

What I'd like is to be able to express that as one of the following
(order is from more preferred to less)
A)
$$1:+iname/+article/+$$2:+itag+($cond/+gt/$date:2006-11-01)+($cond/+lt/$
date:2006-12-01)
B)
$$iname/+article/+$$itag+($cond/+gt/$date:2006-11-01)+($cond/+lt/$date:2
006-12-01)

Option B would need the following additional rules:
.. Any dollar word beginning with two $ is a variable, with the rest of
the dollar word after the $$ being the variable name. Example: ($var/1)
= $$1, Example: ($var/iname) => $$iname
.. An cross-reference consisting of an absolute XRI with only a single
segment non-xref authority and a single segment path can be abbreviated
without parens by replacing the path delimiter with a colon, this is
then called an abbreviated cross-reference. The portion of an
abbreviated cross-reference before the colon is the qualifier, and the
portion after the value of the abbreviated cross-reference. I think that
this means an abbreviated cross-reference wouldn't be mistaken for a IRI
as the IRI scheme couldn't be started with a GCS.  Example:
($date/2006-12-01) => $date:2006-12-01
.. Within parsers the ':' operator is given higher precedence than the
'/', '*', '!', '(', ')' operators, so a:b*c, a:b!c, a:b/c, a:b(c) will
be treated respectively as (a/b)*c, (a/b)!c, (a/b)/c, (a/b)(c)

Option A would need the same rules as option B, and the following rules:
.. Any abbreviated cross-reference in which the qualifier is a variable
has a value that represents the type of the data represented by the
value of the variable.  Example: $$1:+iname
.. Specifying the type of a variable through an abbreviated
cross-reference is optional. Example: The variable '1' might be
expressed within an XPL expression as $$1 and represent any type of
data, or as $$1:+iname and be expected to hold an iname (community or
global).

** Is the $$ syntax cleaner than the longer ($var/type/instance) syntax?

** Is there a standard for this already (either a dollar word like $var
or a shortcut like $$)?

** What are the issues in the above proposed rules and what do you
think?

Thanks,
Bill