Brian wrote:
You seem confused. You seem to think that I care about the proper
way
to
program using templates and parser functions. That's not true, they
are an
ugly hack and I recognize that. If have absolutely no desire to
learn
how to
use something so hideously inefficient in an efficient manner.
Then you shouldn't be presenting examples of how it can't be
implemented
reasonably in template programming.
Almost any _reasonable programming language_ allows you to write ugly code if so you want. That doesn't prove the language is ugly.
Nonetheless... it's ugly :)
Ugly or not, but having a kind of scripting inside the pages can be very much useful. It exteneds the flexibility of sites built on top of the MediaWiki. Probably one of reasons MediaWiki becomes more popular as website engine around the world. Maybe a better syntax and restriction to template namespace would be a good thing, though. I personally liked the idea of pre-parsed and checked limited subset of PHP operators for performance, though the security may be an issue. Dmitriy