[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] Date Index Thread Index Search archive:
Date:Mon Jan 30 16:40:16 1998 
Subject:Re: Complexity 
From:John English 
Volume-ID:980130.01 

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. (R&R don't talk of  thunks -
: did this come from the Kidsgrove compiler or where?)

I seem to remember the term being coined in a CACM paper on Algol 60
implementation by Ingerman in the early '60s. Aha, I've even found
the reference: "Thunks", P.Z.Ingerman, CACM 4 (Jan 61) pp 55-58.
My copy of R&R is dated 1964, so not mentioning thunks is perhaps
surprising.

And of course, as with so many other things, Microsoft have pinched
the term to refer to something else...

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 John English              | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
 Senior Lecturer           | http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/staff/je
 Dept. of Computing        | ** NON-PROFIT CD FOR CS STUDENTS **
 University of Brighton    |    -- see http://burks.bton.ac.uk
-----------------------------------------------------------------