User:Fran Rogers/Project Turing

Ideas to bring Turing-completeness to wikitext, as elegant and usable as possible. Add your ideas if you'd like. :)

• {{#def:}} - creates a new parser function in the current scope. (Lexical scoping hopefully.)
• Elementary functional programming stuff like {{#and:}} and {{#or:}}
• Tail call optimization
• Well-defined "libraries" stored somewhere in MediaWiki: or Template: space. Hopefully cached/byte-compiled/etc.?

Example: {{#def:repeat|{{{2}}}{{#ifeq:{{{1}}}|0||{{#repeat:{{{1}}}|{{#expr:{{{2}}}-1}}}}}}}}

Significant whitespace is a huge problem... what can we do to make complicated code actually readable?

Maybe something like this - wrap code with whitespace to be ignored in special syntax:

{\
  {{#def:repeat|
    {{{2}}}
    {{#ifeq:{{{1}}}|0|
      |
      {{#repeat:{{{1}}}|
                {{#expr: {{{2}}} - 1}}
      }}
    }}
  }}
\}