2011/1/4 Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com:
Excellent, I'm a passionate user of #lst extension, and I like that its code can be optimized (so I feel combortable to use it more and more). I can't read php, and I take this opportunity to ask you:
I haven't read the code in detail, and I can't really answer these question until I have. I'll look at these later today, I have some other things to do first.
- is #lsth option compatible with default #lst use?
No idea what #lsth even is or does, nor what you mean by 'compatible' in this case.
- I can imagine that #lst simply runs as a "substring finder", and I
imagine that substring search is really an efficient, fast and resource-sparing server routine. Am I true?
It does seem to load the entire page text (wikitext I think, not sure) and look for the section somehow, but I haven't looked at how it does this in detail.
- when I ask for a section into a page, the same page is saved into a
cache, so that next calls for other sections of the same page are fast and resource-sparing?
I'm not sure whether LST is caching as much as it should. I can tell you though that the "fetch the wikitext of revision Y of page Z" operation is already cached in MW core. Whether the "fetch the wikitext of section X of revision Y of page Z" operation is cached (and whether it makes sense to do so), I don't know.
What a "creative" use of #lst allows, if it is really an efficient, light routine, is to build named variables and arrays of named variables into one page; I can't imagine what a good programmer could do with such a powerful tool. I'm, as you can imagine, far from a good programmer, nevertheless I built easily routines for unbeliavable results. Perhaps, coming back to the topic..... a good programmer would disrupt wikipedia using #lst? :-)
Using #lst to implement variables in wikitext sounds like a terrible hack, similar to how using {{padleft:}} to implement string functions in wikitext is a terrible hack.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)