Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
And yet, AFAIK, {{yesterday}} *is* a template. If it isn't now, it certainly started as one, and that's the old cycle: you implement the feature you need with what you have, and if it's useful and inefficient, you then push it down into the core.
You haven't, as far as I can see, provided a cogent argument as to why it's good. Hopefully, I have clarified both my point of view and my perception of yours, and some other folks will also jump back on this bandwagon, that we may hear theirs as well.
As the person who wrote that {{yesterday}} template allow me just to say a big "ditto".
I agree that alot of this 'stuff' would be better handled in the MediaWiki software... but I'm not going to hassle the developers to implement this feature and that feature and the other feature. I take whatever they give me and use it to the limits of it's applicability. At some point, if they are useful, those implementations become widespread enough that their inefficiency is a notable issue and they are replaced with a new capability in the base system. That is happening right now for 'qif', 'calcadd', and various unit conversion templates.
Yes, we could put {{yesterday}} and {{tomorrow}} and {{leapday}} and {{NextMonth}} and {{switch}} and {{if defined call}} and all the rest of them directly into MediaWiki, but we aren't there yet... adding just Tim's proposed 'if:' and 'expr:' will vastly simplify and improve the efficiency of all these existing applications. It isn't neccessary to replace each of them with a MediaWiki equivalent right now. Maybe somewhere down the line on or more of those will become as widespread as 'qif' and warrant direct implementation, but they are fine the way they work currently and would be improved by Tim's changes.