In article <34ce2518.0@rcfnews.cs.umass.edu>,
Robin Popplestone <pop@cs.umass.edu> wrote:
>From the implementor's point of view, you don't just stumble into
>call-by-name, because you've got to work at it. Indeed the nomenclature of
>the early Algol implementors, who talked of "thunks" has survived to this
>day in the functional language community for lazy evaluation. Nobody else
>talks of "thunks" or thinks about them either. ...
Not sure what "else" refers to in "Nobody else...". If you mean,
"Nobody else than the functional language community", then that's not
quite true. At least some compiler writers (for non-functional
languages like Ada, for example) use the term "thunk" to refer to any
compiler-generated procedure that doesn't directly correspond to a
source-code-level procedure. This doesn't exactly match the Algol term,
which was really a *pair* of compiler-generated procedures.
- Bob
--
Change robert to bob to get my real email address. Sorry.
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