https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19298
--- Comment #12 from Andrew Garrett <agarr...@wikimedia.org> 2009-06-20 11:24:57 UTC --- (In reply to comment #11) > But we already have functions under "expr", which *do* do computation and are > found in practice to be very useful. Surely len(x) or x[3:5] is far cheaper, > no > more confusing to users and just as potentially useful, as ((x+50)/0.456. Yes, as I said in my previous message, introducing expr and so on was a mistake in my opinion. > Have > you seen the ugly and costly hacks that people are forced to use with > padleft/right just to get the length of a string? And substring retrieval is > impossible, as far as I know, which means some templates end up far more > complex and harder to use than they need be. "Forced" to use? Nobody is forcing you to do ugly things with wikitext that it was never intended to be used for. Those padleft hacks are just as likely to stop working sooner or later, because they're horrible and I haven't seen a single good use case for them. > I agree that the existing syntax > is bad, but the functionality it produces is extremely useful, and the > addition > of a few more functions using reasonable syntax (I'm not saying we need to > have > *every* function that's been requested) is not going to make the overall > syntax > problem any worse. So the existing syntax sucks, but we should encourage it by adding more functions that use it, instead of rethinking our syntax altogether. Your justification for this seems to be that it will take less time and you need your string functions *now*. I don't buy that. -- 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 Wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
