[WikiEN-l] Temporal tags and outdating

[stevertigo]

Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com
>> Could a temporal template in one way or another subst: itself once the
>> expiriation date passes? Now that would be awesome.
William Beutler <williambeutler at gmail.com> wrote:
> A self-updating template seems very unlikely to this non-programmer, but a
> bot could certainly be created to handle these tasks. I wonder if that isn't
> already done on, say, {{as of}} for example?

IANAP so take with a grain of salt, but this is my sense of things.
There are bots that work with templates, categories, etc.. AIUI, for
this kind of template to work requires a switching function that would
be based on the conditional {{if}} templates. One of the complaints
about the template system is that things can only be done through
these boolean templates, which locks the programmer into certain ways
of doing things which themselves are not objectively functional, for
example searching the database. Combining template functions with bot
processes is something people have done, but AFAIK noone has worked on
developing this combination as an actual computing paradigm. During
debates about implenting a scripting language, people seemed hung up
on the surface-level issues with template scripting.

-SC