What is the use-case for this feature? I get specifying byte ranges for parsing headers and whatnot, but I don't know a curl workflow that benefits from this.
It would be a natural extension to treat the @ syntax as a uri (because, come on, it's curl!) if it contains a ":" but even that gets hairy because the next layer of indirection would be --variable-with-curlrc to allow setting the enormous number of parameters one would want when chasing the interior uri