quite often times if you need things not to evaluate, such as within a timer, you use $!<identifier>.
I think it would be handy for variables to also support this for cleaner, easier to follow code, without having to do like % $+ <varname> or $eval(%<varname>,0) or any other sorts to escape evaluation.
Example:
//var %a = 1 | echo -a %!a = %a
much like you'd quite often do something simple like
//echo -a $!ctime = $ctime
I do get however that this might break some scripts if for some bizarre reason someone uses %! as a variable, but I think that would be slim to none, and would only affect the usage of ! in a variable name from being the very start of the variable. like %a!b should still work, but not %!ab.
