That would break scripts that rely on the existing behaviour of being able to append data to $N identifiers.
//tokenize 32 foo | var -s %foo = $1="bar"


The suggestion offered by Riamus is easy enough and breaks nothing.
alias isnull return $iif($1,$1,$2)
//var -s %foo = $isnull($1,42),%bar = $isnull($2,and everything)