I think I'd rather see a 'foreach' style construct for iterating over elements of a list.
e.g.
foreach(%i,$chan(N)) { echo -a %i }
not sure how you'd format that nicely for parsing that, though.
You could also add something like Perl has - the '..' "operator" - so you can construct normal for loops like:
foreach $i (1..10) { print $i }