On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 2:29 PM, BrianBrian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
I was privy to a #mediawiki conversation between brion/tim where tim pointed out that at least one person plans to implement a Natural Language Processing parser for English using StringFunctions just as soon as they are enabled.
It's pretty obvious that you can implement all sorts crazy algorithms using StringFunctions. They need to be limited so that is not possible.
Note, though, that there are some that are already possible to some extent. You can use the core padright/padleft functions to emulate a couple of the added functions. E.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Str_len&action=edit
The most template-heavy pages already tend to run close to the template limits, until they're cut down by users when they fail. It's not clear to me that allowing more functions would actually increase overall load or template complexity significantly. It might decrease it by allowing simpler and more efficient implementations of things that currently need to be worked around. It can't really increase it too much, theoretically -- that's what the template limits are for.
Werdna points out that Tim did say this morning in #mediawiki that he'd probably revert the change.