"Nick Jenkins" wrote:
Yes, it is slightly unfortunate that "|" has been overloaded to mean both a parameter and to perform table-related functions.
Of course with 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to say it could be useful to have two different constructs for these purposes. I suppose it's theoretically possible to introduce a new construct of some type (example: "%") to indicate parameters (since I suspect parameter delimiters are probably used less than "|" in tables), and have an overlap period when both the new and the old construct work to allow transitioning, and to then turn off/deprecate "|" for parameters. Then the old HTML "<table>" syntax could be dropped if there was general support for it (bias disclaimer: I personally prefer the wiki-table-syntax to the HTML-table-syntax), because "|" would no longer interfere with templates or ParserFunctions.
I'm sure | is more used as parameter delimiter than table marker. You only need to count the number of [[link|named links]] a page has, and the number of tables.