Good point, it didn't occur to me to check whether "%var = <value>" also calls /set (which in retrospect makes sense). Having noticed that %var = is at least as fast as /set (in fact, ever so slightly faster), I dismissed that possibility, remembering what an apparently similar approach did to $iif(). It may be, however, that mirc replaces "%var = " with "set %var" or "set -l %var" at an early stage during parsing, so no extra commands are called (like they are called in $iif() for example).
