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.
-- Tim Starling