Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Substitution of "@" and "#" in acs-templating ...

No, this simply causes variable values to be translated at run time.  The kind of endless nested substitution you're asking about can't be done with a compiled template approach because the run time values aren't constant, of course.  Going to a compile-per-view model rather than a compile-and-cache model would make the template system very slow.