Higher-Order Perl (eBook)

WEB SITE

All the code examples in this book are available from my web site at:

When the notation in the margin is labeled with the tag some-example, the code may be downloaded from:

The web site will also carry the complete text, an errata listing, and other items of interest. Should you wish to send me email about the book, please send your message to mjd-hop@plover.com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Every acknowledgments section begins with a statement to the effect that “without the untiring support and assistance from my editor, Tim Cox, this book would certainly never have been written”. Until you write a book, you will never realize how true this is. Words fail me here; saying that the book would not have been written without Tim’s untiring support and assistance doesn’t begin to do justice to his contributions, his kindness, and his vast patience. Thank you, Tim.

This book was a long time in coming, and Tim went through three assistants while I was working on it. All these people were helpful and competent, so my thanks to Brenda Modliszewksi, Stacie Pierce, and Richard Camp. “Competent” may sound faint, but I consider it the highest praise.

Many thanks to Troy Lilly and Simon Crump, the production managers, who were not only competent but also fun to work with.

Shortly before the book went into production, I started writing tests for the example code. I realized with horror that hardly any of the programs worked properly. There were numerous small errors (and some not so small), inconsistencies between the code and the output, typos, and so on. Thanks to the heroic eleventh-hour efforts of Robert Spier, I think most of these errors have been caught. Robert was not only unfailingly competent, helpful, and productive, but also unfailingly cheerful, too. If any of the example programs in this book work as they should, you can thank Robert. (If they don’t, you should blame me, not Robert.) Robert was also responsible for naming the MOD document preparation system that I used to prepare the manuscript.

The contributions of my wife, Lorrie Kim, are too large and pervasive to note individually. It is to her that this book is dedicated.

A large number of other people contributed to this book, but many of them were not aware of it at the time. I was fortunate to have a series of excellent teachers, whose patience I must sometimes have tried terribly. Thanks to Mark Foster, Patrick X. Gallagher, Joan Livingston, Cal Lobel (who first taught me to program), Harry McLaughlin, David A. J. Meyer, Bruce Piper, Ronnie Rabassa, Michael Tempel, and Johan Tysk. Mark Foster also arrived from nowhere in the nick of time to suggest the title for this book just when I thought all was lost.

This book was directly inspired by two earlier books: ML for the Working Programmer, by Lawrence Paulson, and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman. Other important influences were Introduction to Functional Programming, by Richard Bird and Philip Wadler, and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, by Peter Norvig.

The official technical reviewers had a less rewarding job than they might have on other projects. This book took a long time to write, and although I wanted to have long conversations with the reviewers about every little thing, I was afraid that if I did that, I would never ever finish. So I rarely corresponded with the reviewers, and they probably thought that I was just filing their suggestions in the shredder. But I wasn’t; I pored over all their comments with the utmost care, and agonized over most of them. My thanks to the reviewers: Sean Burke, Damian Conway, Kevin Lenzo, Peter Norvig, Dan Schmidt, Kragen Sitaker, Michael Scott, and Adam Turoff.

While I was writing, I ran a mailing list for people who were interested in the book, and sent advance chapters to the mailing list. This was tremendously helpful, and I’d recommend the practice to anyone else. The six hundred and fifty wonderful members of my mailing list are too numerous to list here. All were helpful and supportive, and the book is much better for their input. A few stand out as having contributed a particularly large amount of concrete material: Roland Young, Damien Warman, David “Novalis” Turner, Iain “Spoon” Truskett, Steve Tolkin, Ben Tilly, Rob Svirskas, Roses Longin Odounga, Luc St-Louis, Jeff Mitchell, Steffen Müller, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Walt Mankowski, Wolfgang Laun, Paul Kulchenko, Daniel Koo, Andy Lester, David Landgren, Robin Houston, Torsten Hofmann, Douglas Hunter, Francesc Guasch, Kenneth Graves, Jeff Goff, Michael Fischer, Simon Cozens, David Combs, Stas Bekman, Greg Bacon, Darius Bacon, and Peter Allen. My apologies to the many many helpful contributors whom I have deliberately omitted from this list in the interests of space, and even more so to the several especially helpful contributors whom I have accidentally omitted.

Wolfgang Laun and Per Westerlund were particularly assiduous in helping me correct errors for the second printing.

Before I started writing, I received valuable advice about choosing a publisher from Philip Greenspun, Brian Kernighan, and Adam Turoff. Damian Conway and Abigail gave me helpful advice and criticism about my proposal.

Sean Burke recorded my Ivory Tower talk, cut CDs and sent them to me, and also supplied RTF-related consulting at the last minute. He also sent me periodic mail to remind me how wonderful my book was, which often arrived at times when I wasn’t so sure.

Several specific ideas in Chapter 4 were suggested by other people. Meng Wong suggested the clever and apt “odometer” metaphor. Randal Schwartz helped me with the “append” function. Eric Roode suggested the multiple list iterator.

When I needed to read out-of-print books by Paul Graham, A. E. Sundstrom lent them to me. When I needed a copy of volume 2 of The Art of Computer Programming, Hildo Biersma and Morgan Stanley bought it for me. When I needed money, B. B. King lent me some. Thanks to...