https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19298
--- Comment #10 from Andrew Garrett <[email protected]> 2009-06-20 10:20:53 UTC --- (In reply to comment #9) > Why should parser functions that do strings affect users' sanity? That > attitude > makes no sense to me. Wikitext is supposed to be a *markup* language, not a Turing-complete programming language. It is designed for presentation, not computation. If you want computation, you should write a server-side parser function which implements the functionality you need. For example, somebody recently implemented a full hexadecimal to decimal converted *in wikitext*. That is totally insane, and something that should have been done in its own parser function, once an appropriate use case had been explained. The *point* is that you should be able to, with relative ease, edit a page, template or whatever. That's what Wikipedia is about. The syntax for parser functions, especially with string functions, is totally insane, and is difficult to edit even for experienced programmers. This is a serious usability issue, which would doubtless be made ten times worse by string manipulation parser functions. > If formatnum and padleft are parser functions, then why > shouldn't len and subst be parser functions? Because formatnum and padleft are for markup/formatting, not computation. Giving users the ability to format numbers and values is something that we are more than willing to support. Giving users the ability to write their own natural language parsers (as many have expressed the desire to do) is not something we are willing to support, from a resources perspective (you think it's cheap to parse the intended use cases of these parser functions?), nor from a philosophical perspective (making wikitext even harder to edit is *not* part of our mission). We have not seen a single suggested use case, which we do not object to on one of the above grounds. Therefore, we will not be activating StringFunctions. The reason that we are even *considering* a Lua-based inline expression parser is because it would be difficult to now remove the existing parser functions (which were a bad idea in the first place), and their syntax is terrible and causing serious usability issues on Wikimedia projects. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
