Board Thread:Lua Help/@comment-24473195-20140814161206/@comment-24473195-20140814211057

FishTank wrote: I was unclear. Lua is a fully developed programming language used for lots of things, far beyond the scope of MediaWiki. In the Wikia sense, though, Lua is referring to use of the Scribunto extension for templating using the Lua extension. What you are referring to in your entrybot example is an application extension that is written in Lua for something completely unrelated to Scribunto or MediaWiki. It's not just Wikia that's restraining it. Those kind of functions are not possible for the Lua implementation on MediaWiki (which has been in place on Wikipedia, for example, for some time). Yes, I do realize its limitations. Though it is still feasible using just templating, since I only need this data within a particular page. I could make a big extension that picks up a lot of parameters at once and still achieve what I want.

Alternatively, I can feed the template a big "string", and use pattern recognition to pick up the ones I need and calculate the information I want in any case. I was just looking for a simple way to achieve this rather than a hacky method like that.

I'd love the mysql extension, but wikia probably doesn't support that, so right now I'm just trying to use the templates to provide some basic calculation functions to a table.

Anyway, you make a valid point, I'm probably using it for things it wasn't designed for.