Damian Conway
Damian Conway holds a PhD in computer science and is an honorary Associate
Professor with the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia.
Currently he runs an international IT training company—Thoughtstream—which
provides programmer development from beginner to masterclass level throughout
Europe, North America, and Australasia.
Damian was the winner of the 1998, 1999, and 2000 Larry Wall Awards for Practical
Utility.The best technical paper at the annual Perl Conference was subsequently
named in his honour.He has been a member of the technical committee for The Perl
Conference, a keynote speaker at many Open Source conferences, is a former columnist
for The Perl Journal, and is author of the book Object Oriented Perl.In 2001
Damian received the first “Perl Foundation Development Grant” and spent 20
months working on projects for the betterment of Perl.
A popular speaker and trainer, he is also the author of numerous well-known Perl
modules, including Parse::RecDescent (a sophisticated parsing tool), Class::Contract
(design-by-contract programming in Perl), Lingua::EN::Inflect (rule-based English
transformations for text generation), Class::Multimethods (multiple dispatch polymorphism),
Text::Autoformat (intelligent automatic reformatting of plaintext),
Switch (Perl’s missing case statement), NEXT (resumptive method dispatch),
Filter::Simple (Perl-based source code manipulation), Quantum::Superpositions
(auto-parallelization of serial code using a quantum mechanical metaphor), and
Lingua::Romana::Perligata (programming in Latin).
Most of Damian’s time is now spent working with Larry Wall on the design of the
new Perl 6 programming language.
本书的封面是美洲猎鹿犬(American staghound),它是灵缇犬(greyhound)和苏格兰猎鹿犬(Scottish deerhound)的混种,专门培养来狩猎。狩猎是世界上最古老的野外活动之一,而“锐目猎犬”或“视力型猎犬”早从公元116年起就已经在竞赛场上经受层层考验。
猎鹿犬并非一个品种,而是一个视力型猎犬的类型。虽然从18世纪起,已经有好几条猎鹿犬繁殖线(比某些现代品种更久),但多数猎人对品种鉴别并不积极。他们认为猎鹿犬不应该分类,而是应该作为一个狩猎动物品种,考虑的是功能,而不是形式。因此,它们没有品种标准。猎鹿犬的任何颜色或纹路不是来自于灵缇犬,就是来自于苏格兰猎鹿犬,而且它的皮毛有三种类型:粗毛、滑毛、混毛(界于粗毛和滑毛之间)。
猎鹿犬的很多生理特点都和灵缇犬相同,有长腿、强壮的肌肉、厚实的胸膛以及敏锐的视力,而且具备了苏格兰猎鹿犬的耐力和嗅闻能力。猎鹿犬的狩猎本能如此强大,因此任何会跑的东西(兔子、鹿、土狼等)都会被视为追逐的对象。因为这些狗的奔跑速度快,警觉性强,又不会过于亢奋或具侵略性,有人说,如果适当训练,它们也可以当作绝佳的宠物。