190 years ago today, a whaleship called the Essex was attacked by a whale.

A whaleship attacked and sunk by a whale? What a reversal of expectations! Perhaps Pac-Man said it best: "Looks like the hunters... have become the hunted."

❦

So, tonight while re-watching the unbelievably bad Battlefield Earth — "a Plan 9 for a new generation!" — I tinkered with a re-implementation of .trans that once worked in November (the wiki engine). I ended up with this.

If you'll look at that patch, there's one pattern that I haven't seen anyone else use yet. I needed to define a whole class LongestSubstitutionMatcher, but I didn't want to pollute any global namespace with that name, so I put it in a my variable inside the Cool class. Since my variables act a bit like static variables, I guess you could say that this is a way to make a static inner class in Perl 6. I don't know if this is something I'll use often, but it felt right for this purpose.

Oh, and the line in November that was supposed to work after I implemented this?

my $cleaned_of_whitespace = $trimmed.trans( [ /\s+/ => ' ' ] );

Wouldn't you know it, it's actually wrong! 哈哈 So not only did this once work in Rakudo, it worked wrongly. The array brackets (as gleaned from a cursory skim of S05) have no business being there, and the line should really be this:

my $cleaned_of_whitespace = $trimmed.trans( / \s+ / => ' ' );

With that cleared up, the error I'm now getting from November is this:

postcircumfix:<{ }> not defined for type Str()
  in 'November::make_extlink' at line 1
  in <anon> at line 79:lib/November.pm
  [...]

I think I know why that might be. But this is a problem for next time.