Skip to content

parser

Extending the Pier Parser

Early versions of Pier included the syntax to embed Smalltalk code into a page. This was a nice feature for power users, but caused certain confusion among others. Moreover it also caused potential security issues, when the permissions weren't setup properly. Never the less, as there were some people complaining about the missing feature, I am going to show how to extend Pier and its pluggable parser to support this functionality.

The New Pier Parser

The latest version of Pier introduces a new Wiki parser: The previous parser was built using SmaCC and it dates back to the very early versions of SmallWiki. The new parser is hand-written. This might look like a big step back, however there were several compelling reasons not to use an EBNF based parser anymore: