Interresting comment !
I totally see what you mean.
The thing is that I have already optimised the code and syntax a lot to save some coding tokens and I currently have less than 300 tokens left out of 8192 as the pico8 limit so I'm not sure I'll be able to go very far in the direction you suggest.
But I agree with you that it would be a good improvement !!!
Thanks for the suggestion,
Cheers.