On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Andrew Garrett <and...@epstone.net> wrote:
> About ten minutes. The question is not one of developer time, but one
> of whether we actually want a "character-cannon" (I'm not quite clear
> on what that is, but I'm assuming it's a string-functions expansion of
> wikitext), and what its implications are for performance and
> usability.
Usability in editing meta-templates has been a lost cause since few
years ago with the introduction of {{qif}}. I very much doubt anyone
other than a programmer could edit meta-templates easily without
spending weeks fidgeting with them first. Adding string functions
couldn't possibly *reduce* this level of usability significantly.
I very much doubt that performance would be any kind of issue either.
We're talking about exposing a few low-level functions implemented in
C, with execution of the function itself bounded to fractions of
microseconds (probably much less than transcluding a single template).
This is as opposed to right now, where the absence of such functions
often causes workarounds to be implemented using giant switch
statements or lengthy sequences of ifs.
The only credible argument I can see against StringFunctions (or
similar) is that we should be replacing wikitext with a real
programming language. Until that happens -- and it doesn't look
likely to happen soon -- it could only be helpful to provide some more
efficient and easier-to-use basic programming constructs.
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