On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 9:39 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> greg_l_at_wikipedia wrote:
>> As I understand it, there is rightfully little interest in the
>> developer community to write a new parser function for every single
>> template need to come along.
>>
>> Therefore, when it comes to a template like {{val}}, which now
>> generates rounding errors about 5–10% of the time because of the math-
>> based parser functions it must use, it would be nice if the template-
>> authoring community could have a character-counting parser function
>> that is not only suitable for {{val}}, but which could be a general -
>> purpose parser function that could be used for a great variety of
>> purposes.
>
> I would rather have an application-specific number formatting function,
> rather than a character-counting function. It could be similar to PHP's
> number_format(). Wikitext is a terrible programming language, slow to
> execute and hard to understand. It's much better to write in PHP.
We already have {{formatnum:}} with a very limited functionality that
presumably could be extended.
Though I would like to re-emphasize that Greg's complaint principally
arrises because of floating point round-off errors in #expr that are
difficult for normal editors to predict or plan for, and that should
be addressed irrespective of other work to improve number formatting.
-Robert Rohde
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
