2009/9/25 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
However powerful it is, I'm not sure we can really rule out future incompatibility as you suggest by simply stating that we can easily forwardport. This feature is intended to hack a fix on top of the usability issues inherent in templates. Every time we have a discussion about the pitfalls of wikitext the center of this discussion is templates. Even without parser functions they are turing complete - with them it is a complete usability disaster. So it seems that when we finally get around to developing a consensus about the changes we want in wikitext, there will be widespread agreement that we need to change templates. But so far, without any clear strategy on that front, we have no idea what those changes will be.
It's important to separate template *calls* from template *implementation*: only the latter involves ParserFunctions and all that other ugliness. Even if and when we do completely redo the way templates are *written* on the inside, the way they're *called* from the outside would probably not change significantly, nor would the concepts of parameters and types. This means redoing template syntax does not require any changes to the XML format.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)