Looking for a "Map" or "tie" syntax

I'm trying really hard, but failing, to NOT add more syntax to xmlsh.

The problem I'm trying to solve is the clumbsiness of accessing properties, or name/value pairs,

in particular when serialized to a kind of properties file.

With the advent of the xproperties command, you can now read a standard Java properties file (in either text or xml form) and assign it to a variable.

Suppose you have a simple properties file

a=b

This parses into XML (using the standard Java Properties API) as

<!DOCTYPE properties SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd" []>

<properties version="1.0">

<entry key="a">b</entry>

</properties>

Read into a variable as

props=$<(xproperties -in file.properties)

You can access the value of key "a" with the expression

<[ $props/properties/entry[key="a"]/string() ]>

Am I the only one who finds this extremely cumbersome ?

I would like to do something like one of these

$props.a

$props[a]

$props["a"]

or even

${props:"a"}

But any of these syntax sugars requires the shell "know" the structure of $props and do something magic with it. I really dont like the idea of extending the core syntax to handle a particular schema, even one as common as Java Properties. Suppose for example I wanted Map instead so I could put non-string values ... Properties wont cut it.

MarkLogic has a xquery function for that (map:map()) and various map:* methods to get at the values. I'd like something like this but built into the shell and expandable to arbitrary XML schemas. What to do ?

The latest thought I had was to borrow somethign from Perl (gasp). The tie funciton. "Bind" a variable to an expression so that you could define your own shortcuts with map or array-like syntax.

Suppose for example I could do something like

xbind props '<[ //entry[key=$key]/string() ]>'

then magically make

$props["a"] or maybe ${props:a} or ${props[a] } invoke the bound expression and produce "b"

You could then use this mechanism to create array or map-like notation out of ANY schema.

Is this worth the effort ? When does adding syntax actually start to deter from a language instead of add to it ?