On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Andrew Garrett andrew@epstone.net wrote:
About ten minutes. The question is not one of developer time, but one of whether we actually want a "character-cannon" (I'm not quite clear on what that is, but I'm assuming it's a string-functions expansion of wikitext), and what its implications are for performance and usability.
Usability in editing meta-templates has been a lost cause since few years ago with the introduction of {{qif}}. I very much doubt anyone other than a programmer could edit meta-templates easily without spending weeks fidgeting with them first. Adding string functions couldn't possibly *reduce* this level of usability significantly.
I very much doubt that performance would be any kind of issue either. We're talking about exposing a few low-level functions implemented in C, with execution of the function itself bounded to fractions of microseconds (probably much less than transcluding a single template). This is as opposed to right now, where the absence of such functions often causes workarounds to be implemented using giant switch statements or lengthy sequences of ifs.
The only credible argument I can see against StringFunctions (or similar) is that we should be replacing wikitext with a real programming language. Until that happens -- and it doesn't look likely to happen soon -- it could only be helpful to provide some more efficient and easier-to-use basic programming constructs.