Thread:Extension talk:ParserFunctions/Suggestion: new function ifnot/reply (16)

You're trying to apply a traditional concept in programming language design, but one that doesn't apply well to this situation. It's traditional to try to minimize the number of keywords. However, number of keywords trades off against the overhead cost of structural syntax. In a language with low overhead for structured expressions, it often makes sense to use a really minimal set of keywords, and build slightly more complex strutures to compensate. But the overhead for structured expressions is high in wiki markup, with relatively heavy delimiters and separators, and high likelihood of error when fancy structure calls for consecutive separators. The more effective strategy for wiki markup is to build uniform structure into the set of keywords itself, as there's much lower overhead in providing uniform variation in keywords than in trying to build big cumbersome structured expressions to make up for a minimal keyword set.