terminationId syntax and semantics

I think it is a safe bet that George W. Bush has spent almost his entire
presidency not understanding the rules by which which Megaco termination
identifiers are constructed.  I have been aware of the existence of
Megaco for about the same period, and don't understand them either.

TerminationID = "ROOT" / pathNAME / "$" / "*"

; Total length of pathNAME must not exceed 64 chars.
pathNAME = ["*"] NAME *("/" / "*"/ ALPHA / DIGIT /"_" / "$" ) ["@"
pathDomainName ] 

; ABNF allows two or more consecutive "." although it is meaningless in
a path domain name.
pathDomainName = (ALPHA / DIGIT / "*" ) *63(ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" / "*" /
".")

NAME = ALPHA *63(ALPHA / DIGIT / "_" )

I have been happily building Megaco termination ids of the form
term1/term2/term3, like in MGCP, and hoping the above defintions would
go away.

Now, 3 of the possibilities for TerminationID are simple.  pathNAME is
the tricky one.  What would it mean if it starts with a "*"?  Wildcarded
first term?  But since NAME has to start with a letter, "*/5" would be
illegal, so "*" would have to be a prefix of the first term, not the
whole first term.  Then, once we have seen something like *A/5", we
could then follow it with something ridiculous, like "*A/5$$$_abcd////".
Why is it important that the first term start with a letter and not a
digit?  Why doesn't it matter for the other terms?

When should a terminationID include a pathDomainName and when not?  When
would one want to pepper a pathDomainName with "*"s?

What I am really looking for is to understand the reasoning that led to
defining the syntax as above.  What things was it designed to allow and
what was important to forbid?  Is there semantic meaning to the "/"
characters to delineate terms as units of wildcarding like in MGCP, or
is the stack expected to do the most general regular expression
processing with whatever legal string it gets, and the "/" has no
special meaning?  What abou the other special characters like "$".  Can
they be delimiters?  And so on.

I would be really grateful if someone can help me understand this before
I am older than either the president or the vice president of the U.S.A.

Raphael Tryster
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