Which bird is sometimes referred to as the 'goatsucker'?
European nightjar only sing when perched, and Thomas Hardy referenced the eerie silence of a hunting bird in "Afterwards": "If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink/The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight/Upon the wind-warped upland thorn". "Caprimulgus" and the old name "goatsucker" both refer to the myth, old even in the time of Aristotle, that nightjars suckled from nanny goats, which subsequently ceased to give milk or went blind. This ancient belief is reflected in nightjar names in other European languages, such as German "Ziegenmelker", Polish "kozodój" and Italian "succiacapre", which also mean goatsucker, but despite
Bird–Meertens formalism of parallelisation are considerable. This is the basis of the map-reduce approach. Bird–Meertens formalism The Bird–Meertens formalism (BMF) is a calculus for deriving programs from specifications (in a functional-programming setting) by a process of equational reasoning. It was devised by Richard Bird and Lambert Meertens as part of their work within IFIP Working Group 2.1. It is sometimes referred to in publications as BMF, as a nod to Backus–Naur form. Facetiously it is also referred to as "Squiggol", as a nod to ALGOL, which was also in the remit of WG 2.1, and because of the "squiggly" symbols it uses.