5.2 Quick Names

Sometimes a particular macro must be used extremely often. When this happens, it is desirable to make the macro's name as short as possible. The shortest ordinary FunnelWeb macro name is the empty name "@<@>", which is four characters long. Single-character names are five characters long.

To cater for the cases where really short names are needed, FunnelWeb provides a quick name syntax that allows one-character macro names to be specified in two less characters. Quick names take the form of the special character, followed by a hash (#) followed by a single character. Examples:

   @#A     @#|     @#&     @#m

This form of macro name has the same syntactic functionality as an ordinary name and can be substituted wherever an ordinary name can be. In fact quick names live in the same namespace as ordinary macro names. For example the quickname @#A is the same name  (refers to the same macro) as the ordinary name @<A@>.

Because quick names look syntactically "open" (i.e. they do not have a closing@> as ordinary names do), it is best to avoid them except where a macro must be called very often.