35 years ago today, the steamship Yarmouth Castle, on a pleasure cruise from Miami to the Bahamas, caught fire and sank.

The ship was made of wood, and was freshly painted, so the fire spread quickly.

87 people went down with the ship, and three later died while treated at hospitals. The disaster brought on changes in the international Safety of Life at Sea law. One of the changes was "do not build passenger ships out of wood".

❦

I've been here and there today, nibbling at stuff. Did a little more work on pls, cleared out my queue of pending rakudobugs, and patched an LTA error message in Rakudo.

But the chunk of "actual" November work today was restoring Shrdlu to the living. The commit summarizes what needed doing:

• Can't assign to a variable that contains *. (I submitted this as [perl #79166], because I think it's ridiculous that the prior content of a variable would determine whether the assignment "succeeds".)
• Some rules really wanted to be tokens. (Grammars are hard. Someone should give a course or something. I've learned a bit since I wrote that code.)
• Nowadays (as per spec), >>~~<< needs parens around lhs and rhs. (Generally, hyperops have "transparent" precedence, i.e. the same as the operator they're meta-ing. Since ~~ would require parens, so does >>~~<<.)

Shrdlu is a really nice project that I will tell you all about some day. Also, I'll start actually hacking on it some day... after I've grokked what that Terry Winograd was doing.