  The Weyl-van-der-Waerden spinor technique for calculating helicity amplitudes
of massive and massless particles is presented in a form that is particularly
well suited to a direct implementation in computer algebra. Moreover, we
explain how to exploit discrete symmetries and how to avoid unphysical poles in
amplitudes in practice. The efficiency of the formalism is demonstrated by
giving explicit compact results for the helicity amplitudes of the processes
gamma gamma -> f fbar, f fbar -> gamma gamma gamma, mu^- mu^+ -> f fbar gamma.
